


High on Her Own Supply

by alephthirteen



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: "Chromatic Kryptonite" has interesting properties, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, And Kara tells her they'll manage, Because we need Lena looking worried at the kitchen table, Because we need to talk babe, But Lena likes it, But in a sexy way, F/F, F/M, Foursomes, Good Lex Luthor, Idiots in Love, Idiots in lust, If it counts as domestic when there's a webcam, It's new and different, Kara asks Lena to put clothes on, Kara is feeling a bit racy today, Lena and Kara domesticity, Lena has mommy feelings about Ruby, Lena is a porn mogul, Lena is not rich, Lena is ruthless, Really it is a lot easier to solve crime than the comics make it look, Recreational use of Blue and Pink Kryponite, Ruby is Kara's Daughter, SO MUCH SMUT YOU GUYS, Sam is a lesbian to watch out for, Single mother kara, TW: Attempted Sexual Abuse, The Book of Destiny, Threesomes, Two Karas for Each Lena, Twosomes, With her hair in a messy bun, Words are hard with Naked Lena, and so on - Freeform, because they have each other, contains smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:54:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26464510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alephthirteen/pseuds/alephthirteen
Summary: The one where Lena is disowned by the Luthors and thrown out on the street.  Lex packs her a go bag.  Right next to her copy of theThe Price of Saltis a massive, leather-bound, ominous-as-all-fuck book that probably single-handedly created the Satanic Panic...ORThe one where Lena uses highly unconventional methods to support herself but never forgets what it's like to go hungryORThe one where Lena is the female, gay, soft version of Hugh Hefner, gliding from gasping bedmate to gasping bedmate until a new blonde walks in for the "girl next door" series.ORThe one where the existence of both aliens and the multiverse opens doors when it comes to specialty pornography.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 37
Kudos: 71





	1. Raindrops (an origin story)

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when authors get lonely and horny during quarantine and veer into ever-dirtier tags in the SuperCorp ships.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where we get our first glimpses of our entrepreneur, Lex really isn't so bad, Lena has a slinky friend and Andrea Rojas was not ready for this jelly...

**Lena, aged 13**

Lillian's nails left four deep gouges on the left cheek. The rain digs into the wounds, making the sting worse. Lena can scarcely feel the dampness over the pain. The shirt is slick and cold and heavy. Lex looked like he wanted to protest but he didn't. When it came down to it, came down to "his Ace" or his mother, he picked his mother.

The back door key she was given last summer doesn't work. Naturally. Lillian isn't the sort to call Child Services. Why bother, when a wet 'mongrel pup' is as likely to drown in the rain as anything else?

She's still on the grounds. Her mother doesn't usually let the guard dogs out before sundown. She doesn't need much. She doesn't want much. Some books, a change of clothes, Cassandra, assuming Lillian hasn't beheaded the poor creature and given her to the cooks. The head butler was sneaking cash out of some old stash of Lionel's last night. 

Hopefully, he didn't take it all.

The treehouse! Lex's treehouse still has the rope ladder dropped. 

As soon as she grabs it, the rope pokes and cuts and puts needle-like spurs in her palms. Lena's arms burn by the time she reaches the half-way point where Lex put the plank. Gulping wet, painful lungfuls of frigid Maine air, Lena starts the second half of her climb. With a last mad scramble, she gets her fingers onto the boards that make up the floor.

Something soft and lime-green slides across her skin. Lifting herself up but keeping her head back, Lena is face to face with Cassandra and, curiously, three eggs. Each of them with the LuthorCorp biolab barcodes. The snake watches Lena with slitted pupils and a lazy flick of a cherry red forked tongue. Her scales are thicker than before, heavier too. Interlocking like plates of armor. If the skeletal and scale density mutation triggered successfully, it seems the CIA may get their money's worth after all.

> _**Dear Ace** _
> 
>   
> _**I put together a care package for you and Cassie. I brought half of the viable eggs here and I snuck the trigger enzyme into Cass' food before I swapped her for the male we used in the lab. The butler said we're having a 'rare dish from Louisiana' this evening. I couldn't risk it. I'm afraid mother's sadism will come up a bit short and cost LuthorCorp the male half of a quarter-billion-dollar defense project.**_
> 
> _**Project Stilletto paid off! The mouse with the red fur has the telomere virus and the blue one has the pigmentocytes virus. I already gave her the venom and skeletal enyzmes in her morning mouse. Hence the snout clamp. Please don't get killed by our weird pet, Ace.** _
> 
> _**Sorry I couldn't find more bubble wrap for the eggs so I gr**_ _**abbed a can of quick-forming foam from the engineering cabinet.** _
> 
> _**Your Brother Always, Lex** _
> 
> _**PS - Take the antivenom retrovirus IMMEDIATELY. She will start producing in a matter of hours and I'm told the neurotoixin blend came out several orders of magnitude more effective then intended but give it three days and you'll the only immune human being alive. I was hearing whispers about parthogenesis too so maybe get a bulk rate on terrariums.  
> ** _

"Thank you, Lex."

"C'mere, darling," Lena coos, offering the sleeve of her shirt to the snake. Cassandra slides up it immediately, draping over Lena's collarbones and tucking her head between the shoulder blades. Her usual contented purr is muted. 

"Yeah, I'm cold too. I'll make us a nice fire."

Lena sighs. 

"Under the overpass, I guess."

Lena unzips the duffel. Three changes of clothes. Chemical hand warmers. The fancy ones from _his_ winter coat. The small box in the back of her closet stuffed with tampons. Who knows what he thought was in it. Her favorite books. The bottom of the bag is weighted with some old leather tome that looks like it belongs on a horror movie set. Lex put a sticky note on it reading ' _waterproof, floats. seemed like a good place for your meds_ ' and cracking the cover, she sees that he hid her entire supply of medications -- several months at least -- in Ziplocs pressed between pages.

Shaking the foam can, Lena looks around for a good egg box. Nothing up here but cardboard and her blocks from when she was a kindergartener and the Jack-in-the-box uncle Luke gave her before Lillian forbid her from talking to family.

"Perfect!"

She rips the guts out of the toy, sprays it full of foam and tucks the eggs in before the foam hardens, covering them with socks to prevent them from sticking. Another layer of foam on the lid should mean protection from impact at any angle. She carefully closes the lid. Cass hisses approvingly as if she could somehow tell the eggs are intact.

"Come on, girl. Let's get out of here."

Lena slides down the rope.

* * *

**FIVE DAYS LATER**

* * *

Someone grabs Lena's wrist and yanks, making her scream.

"Get up, you!"

He hauls her up, dangling her at face level. The pain is bright, sizzling and every twitch of his hand renews it.

_Dislocated shoulder, probably._

The man dragging her to her feet isn't one of the homeless here. He's not exactly winning any hygiene awards but he has access to a shower, somewhere.

"She'll do!" calls the voice of someone Lena can't see. "Load her up and we can go."

"Hang on, hang on! Have some fun first!"

"That wasn't the deal, you ass!"

"Shaddup! This little whore isn't a virgin anyway," she snarls, plucking at her piercings.

Crazy Sally did those. Nice lady. Used to be a medic in the Army, she says. The tattoos suggest she isn't lying and she's saner than Lena is. She told Lena she stuck with her callsign because people who see a fit, grimy, tall woman with a name that includes "Crazy" and they're likely to assume it means 'eat your face crazy' not 'former soldier' crazy.

"Excuse me!" Lena snaps. "Don't make assu-"

There's a flash of green in the corner of her vision and a wail of pain. The man holding her thrashes and jerks and foams at the mouth before falling, taking her down with him. Cassandra slides back into the collar of her shirt, tickling Lena's neck with her tongue on the way.

"Good girl!" Lena chortles.

The man tries to get to his feet and pitches forward, his legs scrabbling and thumping nervelessly on the filthy pavement until he's finally still. On top of Lena's lungs. Cassies irritated his from the small of Lena's back is actually comforting. If she were a normal, unenhanced viper, Cassandra would have been crushed.

"Get off me, you fat pervert!" Lena shrieks, slapping at his greasy face.

It takes three of the men and Crazy Sally along with three broom handles to wedge the body off her.

"You all right, little lady?" Sally asks.

Lena gulps.

"Yeah. Guess Cassie didn't like my boyfriend."

Sally snorts.

"Some pet. Best get going, girl. The police are going to come sniffing and I can't have any teenage witches with magic snakes hanging 'round when they do."

* * *

**TWO DAYS LATER**

* * *

"Yo, Cassie?" Lena mumbles, crumbs from the stolen protein bar speckling her shirt.

She has Lex's weird flotation device of a book open on her lap. It makes less than no sense. It's like the Voynich manuscript got drunk and had a one night stand with the Monster Manual from D&D creating page after page after page of plants, formulas in a script that isn't Latin, though it's close. The alphabet looks much like Latin but there's just too many letters for that. Besides that all she knows is that it's it's also not Arabic, Cryllic, Sanskrit or Mandarin. 

"This isn't written in snake, is it?"

Cassie slithers out, tastes the book wth her tongue and lifts her broad head to look at Lena.

"Worth a try, girl."

Getting the feeder mice was easy. There was a pet store with a bad back door lock right next to a gas station with a malfunctioning icebox. At this point, Cassandra is set for the winter, as are the unhatched eggs. Lena's the one in danger of starvation.

Worst case, she'll find somewhere that's warm year-round and let them go. No sense in her only friend dying when the police come to investigate Lena's corpse.

Lena flips a few more pages and she spots something in the lower right. Where a page number would be on a non-crazy book.

"No fucking way."

_That's a hydrogen atom. Meaning that is..._

She flips a page.

"Helium."

She flips seventeen pages forward. She always found the structure of Krypton gas easy to memorize for some reason.

"Holy fuck."

Lena flips back. That can't be right. This book had to be cleaned of its arsenic-based green pigment on the cover, Lex told her when she found it. Last year it was her summer chore to re-order the upstairs library. He said it wasn't the original cover anyway and it wasn't safe to touch it. She looked it up later. It's something that English binding houses stopped using in the 1820s.

_It's a cipher. This book was rebound two hundred years ago, meaning it's much older. And the author he periodic table for a cipher._

Lena can't resist. She carefully counts forward until she's gone a hundred pages. Fermium. First discovered in the debris of an H-bomb in 1952. 

"What the fuck?"

* * *

**FOUR YEARS LATER**

* * *

**Lena, aged 17**

Mia's last aftershocks soften and she melts into the mattress.

"I don't usually have that good of sex on _my_ birthday, you little animal," she huffs. "Happy twenty, doll."

Mia is easily the best regular Lena has. Big-boned, big-handed, big-fingered. Blue-eyed and honey blonde. Breasts a girl could drown in. Never fails to check-in, never forgets lube, pays extra for extra hours, lets Lena pump her for sex tips while she recovers. Their pillow talk takes Lena to all the places she should have gone as a Luthor: Paris, Milan, Oslo, Cambridge, Rome. She brings dog-eared copies of Faulkner, Faust, Feynman and once said her wife credited Lena with saving their marriage. 

She even let Lena shoot her up with the antivenom just in case Cassie or her hatchlings ever snuck out of their terrarium. 

It's what makes this so awful.

It's the littlest mistake. Lena's wallet fell out of her clutch while Lena was wrist deep and on top, doing her level best to dent the wall with the headboard. The little one inside the secret pocket...with her real ID.

"My god, Lena! How could you?" Mia squeaks.

"It changes nothing," Lena replies, cooly. Her voice sounds far too much like Lillian's for her liking. "I'll refund you for today's session and we can go our separate ways."

"You won't..." Mia gulps. "Report me?"

" _Never_. I didn't get in this for some sort of power trip. I truly enjoy it, hand to god. Frees up time for my GED. I like women. I like fucking women and when I was thrown out on the streets I had two things: tits, ass and old-money boarding school manners."

"I think that's four things, at least."

"Six if you count each tit and ass cheek separately," Lena jokes. "But no. I got the fake ID when I started doing cam shows to get around the age wall and so I could rent an apartment, have a bank account, all that jazz."

Mia nods.

"Is there anything of an uh, G-Rated nature? Anything at all I can do for you?"

Lena flops down on her mattress, feeling naked which is unusual even though she _is_ naked. Clothing is for going to the mailbox or letting the landlord in. Besides that, it has little utility for her. 

"SAT study book, maybe?" Lena sighs. "Have my sights on MIT."

Mia snorts.

"You've pulled off this con? You could get in. But..."

"My wife is on the rewrite team. Come February, a new set of questions is going to be in use."

Lena scrambles to an upright position.

"Are you saying..."

"It's something like 2,000 questions to memorize but yes. I'm pretty sure I can sneak you a copy."

Lena offers her hand.

"Deal. Be well, Mia. Wish we could've kept going."

"If I hadn't known, gorgeous, we would have."

* * *

_**Dearest Lex,** _

_**One of my clients found out today. We parted amicably enough but I think I'll miss her. She didn't out me so I could just keep going. It's good money and I get to sleep until two in the afternoon! Always loved that when I was a girl.** _

_**I'm not giving up this side of me. I enjoy it and I'll probably keep doing something for years to come. Go legit. Webcam shows or pose for Playboy or something. There's a rush to it...a mystery. Like I've stumbled on a secret garden. Strange how breaking one law opens so many doors.** _

_**I'm still planning to go to school in the fall. Don't tell Lillian she won that argument. Hoping for MIT. If anyone asks I'll act flattered and say 'no relation'.** _

  
_**Your Ace** _   
  
_**PS - Please find enclosed a Bitcoin stamp for my half of the Tesla at cash price. I'm sure the family will want you in some ostentatious gas guzzler when you take the big chair. Just let me know when and where and I'll take it off your hands.** _

_**Cherry Red or Acid Green would be my picks.** _

* * *

**Lena, aged 18**

The girl holding her hand out is _exactly_ the type of trouble that Lena needs. She's wearing designer clothes and Lena's in a freebie MIT sweatshirt and she is looking at Lena like the best thing that ever happened to her rich ass is meeting Lena.

"Andrea Rojas."

Lena takes her hand.

"May I?"

Andrea nods lightly and Lena lifts the hand to her lips. She kisses the knuckle, long and wet and _promising_ and Andrea's icy blue eyes darken a shade.

"I...ah...didn't get your name?"

"Is that a statement or a question?" Lena teases.

"Statement. No. Question. What is your name, that's the question."

"Oh my god!" Lena chortles. "You're adorable! Especially when you ramble!"

"I'm Lena Luthor."

"Really?" Andrea gushes. "Of the New York Lu-"

Lena waves her hands.

"No relation."

Andrea scoffs.

"As if that dried up old hag could possibly have a daughter like you."

"Top bunk or bottom?" Andrea asks.

"Depends. You single?" Lena jokes.

Andrea just stops. Freezes in mid-step.

"Why?"

"Well, seems to me we only need one bunk, if we're sharing it."

* * *

**FRESHMAN YEAR**

(Machine Learning and Digital Ethics / PHIL 108)

* * *

Lena raises her hand and beside her, Andrea groans.

"Yes, miss Luthor?"

"Professor, we've been talking about deepfakes as a means of creating _false_ footage for political reasons. What about using them to create anonymous footage for privacy or public relations reasons?"

The professor -- and rumpled Swiss man and total pervert -- blinks at her. Siebert or Sievers or something.

"Any news station can create pixelations of suspects."

"True," Lena admits. "But they can't replace one suspect's face with another. They certainly can't be combined with a trojan to replace footage retroactively. How much do you think Paris Hilton would pay to have put someone _else's_ face on her body in that video? For a more above-the-board example, how much would an Oscar-winning actress pay for a seamless replacement of the body double's face with hers? Vice versa, if she thought her co-star was cute?"

Andrea elbows her, hard.

"Shut up, you perv!"

The old man smiles.

"That's an entirely unrelated line of questioning, young lady. See me after class."

He didn't want much. A deniable over-the-clothes feel and some needling questions about why she wanted to pursue this angle, which she answered with full honesty. She walked in wondering if she was going to have to fend him off and she walks out having made him genuinely curious about her ideas. 

When it turned out his password was 'lolita' it was all Lena could do not to install a virus on his machine. 

* * *

**SOPHOMORE YEAR**

* * *

Andrea coughs the instant she steps in the door.

"What the hell, Lena?" 

"Smells like...ugh...ramen, Mountain Dew and melted dildo or something."

"Just ozone," Lena replies, putting the soldering iron back. "Overvolted the test unit. Had to replace half of the VRMs. Glad I did that before I installed the Phi cards and the Infiniband. Sorry, I did tear down one of the magic wands. Turns out there was a little bit of palladium in the circuit board. Just the last scrap I needed."

"Uh-huh. And that franken-thing does what, exactly?"

She points at four former mini-fridges that Lena gutted, mounted ventilation fans in and stuffed with processors to make a compute cluster. Dangling between each are fat bundles of fiber optic cables.

"Andrea Rojas, meet _Belle de Jour._ She's my first neural net video-editing system. Hey, do you have that album on your phone of whatsherface? The one who snaked your boyfriend?"

Andrea nods.

"Email it to me."

"This is going to be something evil, isn't it?"

Lena raises an eyebrow.

"No! No! No sexy eyebrows until you tell me what's going on!"

"Just email them, Andi."

Lena opens her laptop and loads the pictures into a thumb drive. She turns on her TV, plugs the HDMI into the board she superglued on top of the case, and flicks the dip switches.

"Thirty-seven images. Plenty."

She lifts her top off and lifts her boobs up to the camera.

"See anything different about me?" she purrs.

"Um, er, well, they are very nice...and...ah."

Lena covers herself.

"Andi, count to ten backward, all right, babe? Let me know when you're ready to talk."

"Hey!" Andrea finally manages. "You do realize that those are unfair, right?"

Lena snorts.

"Says the girl with legs for miles."

Lena rewinds the footage.

"See, Andi? Maria de Santiago just flashed her boobs at the camera."

Andrea leans in.

"Holy fuck. I would one hundred percent believe it was her. And you could do that with anybody?"

Lena flops down on the bed and mashes some M&M's in her mouth.

"More importantly, I can do it with nobody. Make someone up so no one real can get shamed for porn. Pull a few hundred stock photo models who are _close_ and make a face from that. Put it on whatever I want. Whole industry of couples who shoot amateur porn and the key thing limiting it the fact that most wear masks to protect their real identities."

Andrea whistles.

"And the reason for this is..."

Lena wriggles out of her jeans and throws them at Andrea's head.

"Get over here. I'm going to shoot Maria de Santiago's scandalous sex tape and I need Andrea Rojas to do it..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lena's before-eighteen sex work wasn't going to be a focus of the story but I did want to establish it as part of her habits about charity, her political views, etc.  
> \-----  
> What Lena is doing isn't even remotely sci-fi. The "r/deepfakes" porn scandal was terrifyingly believable at putting A-List actresses in porn movies using existing interview footage, etc. It was shut down fast, thankfully, but I wonder how much farther it could have gone with a less skeevy premise and a willing subject who would sit for sample photos, audio and video?


	2. This is a Bad Idea...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Lena considers entering new markets, her booty call gives new meaning to sleepy snuggles, and a performer gives new meaning to the phrase "hot-blooded".

**Lena, aged 22**

The assistant for Juicy Productions drags Lena through the overwrought Malibu mansion with all the care and interest of one pushing a shopping cart. It's a whirl of sensations. Makeup artists plopping powder on cheeks, throats, breasts, between the legs of the actresses. Sound technicians flicking microphones with their fingernails to check the gain is turned up enough. Banks of LEDs so blinding that her eyes hurt.

"There," the woman snaps. "Fix it." She points at a room.

Lena expected to be faced with one of her cameras, or one of her turnkey deep-fake systems. To be asked to repair her _tech_ which is something she can do alseep, naked, or with a woman slurping away between her legs. Not this.

A bed containing two naked women, both redheads. The slender, leggy one is bawling and the plusher, bustier model is hugging her close. A male actor who to his credit looks absolutely horrified is trying to burrow into the wallpaper in the corner. Until thirty seconds ago, her visits to Juicy sets has mostly led to Lena leaving bored by the setup and turned on by the bodies involved.

This time? Disgust.

"This?" Lena blurts out. "Fix this? How?"

"You're gay, ain't ya?" the assistant demands in a lazy drawl. "Do whatever _you people_ do and get Clara back on her back and back to work."

Hearing that venom in that accent makes Lena want to burn everything from Texas to Florida to ash.

"Right!" Lena exclaims, clapping her hands. "Fetch me the F-S rep and I'll get started."

The assistant's eye's narrow.

"Listen here you up-jumped screwdriver jock-"

Lena jerks her thumb over her shoulder.

"Someone either forgot a safe word or forgot to make it available. You haven't violated Section 19 yet but if I don't hear some _enthusiastic_ and _believable_ consent, you will have. And I'm as gay as you are a nasty bitch so I know when a woman actually wants it. So get that G-Man here, now. Otherwise I take my _leased_ tech, dump the footage of your little strap-up, buy out your contract and report this shit-show the moment I'm back to my car. We clear?"

The sobbing of the slenderer redhead (Clara?) slows. 

"Strap-up?" the actor in the corner asks.

"Well, I've never really been into cock so I don't call them cock-ups," Lena teases.

Everyone laughs at that, even the camera guy.

The inspector for the Department of Justice is a bespectacled, pixie-cut woman with bright blue hair. She wears a blue windbreaker with FBI on it and under these crazy new "anti-trafficking laws" one creatively exaggerated report from her could shut Juicy down by end-of-business and have whispers of sex slavery and child-rape swirling around for years, inaccurate though they are. It's what owners and performers live in fear of and only the rigid hiring of impeccably honest agents has prevented the entire porn industry from collapsing.

Having nearly been child trafficked under a much tighter version of the laws and having seen good friends who loved their work end up on sex offender lists, Lena knows they're classic federal overreach. Assuming that swinging the hammer harder will make the nail bigger and easier to find.

Lena offers to shake. 

"Lena Luthor, Mirage Technologies."

"Special Agent Smoulders."

Lena sighs.

"Right. Full disclosure, I've been here before. Well," she sighs. "Close to here. My partner that evening thought she wanted to try anal and gagging. We set up a system of taps instead. She'd tried gagging before but..." 

Lena sighs.

"She lost focus and tried to say it and I didn't clock it and she had forgotten the taps."

Smoulders nods slowly.

"Honest mistake, I assume?" she needles.

Lena laughs. "Yes. I made it up to her. Couldn't use my tongue for a week. Had to go on a liquid diet."

The agent snorts and just maybe, Lena sees a flicker of kinship. More intriguing, she sees a flicker of silver metal underneath the windbreaker's collar. Engraved metal. The agent is someone's sub or a domme who demands jewelry gifts. Meaning check-ins, aftercare, all the less-sexy but more-important parts are old habits for her.

_Sending queer agents with roleplay chops to the mainstream sets? Diabolical._

The agent flips through the paper on her clipboard.

"Says here you're a vendor. You built the editing system."

Lena nods.

"Face replacement was my first patent. Amateur performers pay a monthly subscription to have computer-generated faces pasted over. No blurring. Full camera angle options. Ups their take considerably."

"...and lowers the risk of blowback at their day jobs."

Lena nods.

"I actually get ' _thanks for getting me fired!_ ' cards sometimes when a couple goes full-time."

Smoulders pushes her glasses up and pinches her nose.

"They grabbed you because you were in flannel and sneakers and read as gay. So they figured you could fix this."

"Yup," Lena replies, popping the sound as hard as she can. "And I'm not stupid so I'm having you here to supervise."

She starts with the actor.

"You. Ever been pegged? Sucked a dick?"

He shakes his head.

"Shut up and stand there then. Nothing personal but if you've never been penetrated, never had something shoved inside your body?"

He nods.

"You're not going to wrap your head around how out of it she's feeling right now."

The curvier actress tilts her head and puts her tongue out.

"Told you it should be a to-do item!"

He groans.

"Yes, dear."

Lena snorts. The married couples in the business are like walking sitcoms. She crouches down next to the still-shaking girl and covers one of her long, slim hands with both of her own. The skin is like ice. Lena wonders if this girl should be in a hospital instead.

"How old are you, sweetie?"

"Twenty-two."

Lena smiles. 

"Me too. Is Clara your real name?"

She nods.

"OK, Clara honey, tell me what you did like and didn't like."

Without warning, she leans in to whisper it in Lena's ear.

_If only I'd picked up Lillian's hobby of cold-blooded murder._

Lena looks over he shoulder at the agent.

"She's used to penises, not dildos. Didn't like the taste. Tried to bite down and slipped. Got it right in the tonsils. Someone didn't consider using _fucking flavored lube,_ " Lena snarls at the prop guy.

"Now then..."

Lena taps her chin and glances between the players. Her mind reels through some options. Rosie could take Clara with the strap from behind and what-his-dick could jerk off watching but that would be too realistic and too much like the icebreaking part of a real threesome. Clara doesn't look the like the sort of veteran who can keep her teeth in when she comes but Rosie looks like she could make the girl come so hard she dislocates something. So that option is out unless there's a urologist on hand and possibly a surgeon specializing in sudden penis removals.

"Clara, can I suggest something?"

Clara nods.

"M'good. You being here helps."

"Aren't you nice?" Lena jokes, letting her accent out to play.

"Irish?" Rosie inquires.

"County Wicklow. Bastard daughter of a businessman who had a fling and took me in. He died and his wife threw me out on the streets. When I made it to college, I did two years abroad. Dublin."

"S'nice," Clara mumbles. "Dublin."

Her voice shifted now that she's speaking above a whisper. Her accent is neon bright and emerald green. It fits her ivory, freckle-drenched skin like a glove. Lena wonders if this is what her wife would sound like, if she never met Lillian Luthor and lived in Ireland.

"Oh dear," Lena laughs. "Clara, don't talk too much, OK? This will get ethnic real quick if you do. Sound good, love?"

Lena steps back.

"Right. What's your name?" she asks the man, finally bothering to include him in her calculations.

"Frank."

"Frank and Rosie. Sounds like World War II recruiting poster."

"We used one for our invitations," Rosie admits.

The assistant is back now and looks like she wants to strangle Lena for the delay.

"Right. Here's the idea. After that shock to the taste buds Clara's not up for anything in her mouth. So. Rosie, you with the strap in her pussy. Stuff her little cunt," she snarls.

Clara shivers appreciatively and when she catches herself doing it, she giggles.

_I've got your back, little one._

"Hold her. Face to face. Frank, you under her reverse cowgirl and if you put that any farther up her ass than she begs you for, I will murder you myself, here and now. FBI agent or no FBI agent."

Smoulders snickers.

"Everybody to their places!" Lena calls out.

She covers her mouth.

"Whoops! That's your line," she mutters to the assistant.

As Rosie goes past on her way to towel herself off and grab a fresh harness, Lena grabs her arm.

"You do this much?"

She shakes her head.

"When you're all the way down, grind together. Your clit will get a workout and so will hers. Feels good. She'll feel good. When she's turned on, she'll bear down. Tell her she's tight. Tell her she feels so good on your cock. Drop your voice. Particularly with newbies and particularly with bisexual newbies, I've had girls get sheepish. Wonder if it feels good for me because they can't figure out that it does. Talking to them and taking that role gives them a comfy frame of reference."

"Uh, thanks."

Lena nods stiffly.

She flops down into the folding chair beside the agent.

"Tic-Tac?" Smoulders asks with a mouth full of them.

"Sure."

\-----

This time it goes swimmingly and it had everything to do with Lena translating the scene. Someone in a writing room (why the fuck does that sort of video porn have writers?) spend hours on that scene and got it wrong. She spent twenty minutes and ended up with a jelly-legged hug from a sweaty, punch-drunk Clara to warm her up on the drive home.

As she hits the freeway between LA and Frisco, Lena gets an idea so she toggles the autodrive on and leans back in the Tesla to grab her laptop. It's just a little nubbin of one, like a grit of sand in a clam's shell.

A week later she finds herself bored and more awake than her bedmate and not interested in looking at the blinking red balance in her bank account. The only thing more expensive than buying massively threaded computer processors is having someone create their own devices based on Lena's partial diagram. Last year's profits are already gone and this year profits will barely cover these new import taxes targeting China and that's before the cost of tearing down the factory and rebuilding it stateside is factored in.

She turns her phone brightness down before calls up Juicy's member's page and pulls up two scenes: the three-girl scene that was spliced in before the one she helped with and what she more and more thinks of as 'her' scene.

Naturally, the number of boobs is roughly proportional to the views. What intrigues her is the thumbs down rating. On the three-girl scene, it's about five percent. On "her" scene, it's zero. No one who watched it for more than 30 seconds downvoted it.

She flicks through some comments. More than a few are from females and more than a few from female _couples._

She scrubs through the footage, back and forth. Then slows it down.

There's an instant, maybe three frames total, where Rosie's skin is aflame. Literally. Blue-white and blazing and covering her whole body. Lifting her hair up on an unseen column of wind. It's almost too fast for the cameras to have caught and the heat wasn't present for long enough to have hurt her costars.

It should have killed Rosie and given that it comes with an arch of the back and every muscle in her body snapping taut, the cause isn't hard to guess.

Lena turns on incognito mode and zooms in on the lower left, looking for her tech's watermark.

Nothing. This is real footage.

This morning, a teenage refugee in Iraq reduced half of a terrorist checkpoint to atoms. The news has been talking about little else besides the 'metahuman terror threat' and here Lena is looking at what simply _cannot_ be a normal human woman's reaction to orgasm. 

_Her hand was so cold before._

Clara's skin was unnaturally cold because she was turned off. When she was turned on, she flashed white-hot for about as long as it takes the first flash of orgasm to connect in the brain.

"Holy fuck."

Layer upon layer of ideas are packed over the sand. It's a pearl now.

"M'tired," Gayle grumbles beside her. "T'morrow. Fuck more tomorrow."

Lena chuckles. A moment ago she wasn't sleepy. Now? Now she feels like she's going under. Like a drug is filling her brain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gayle Marsh is "Psi" in the Supergirl TV show, a psychic who can project feelings onto others.


	3. Glowy...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kara discovers some really weird hangups Earth women have, Alex is proud of her queer sister training chops, and Rao always answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kara is about 6 years younger than Lena in this story. I feel that is the minimum plausible gap to get a Masters and PhD in, let alone also get a startup off the ground. It also happens to be roughly Katie McGrath and Melissa Benoist's age difference not that Katie ever ages...

**Kara, aged 17**

"Give me a hand."

Kara braces and Mackenzie's hand -- so warm, even though the jacket -- clamps tight for support. She fiddles with her heels, sliding the right one off and shaking it.

"Hah!" she laughs. "Begone, foul pebble!"

She kisses Kara's cheek.

"Thanks."

Laughing is good. Girls laughing is good. Good. Not just frosting-on-pancakes good, either. Laughing and kissing on the cheek is forgetting-to-stick-to-the-ground good. This is why Alex looked happy when she came home for Christmas. Maggie laughed. Maybe even laughed _twice_ but that might kill Alex. She's human. Kara doesn't think she can take three Kenzie laugh-kiss loops before she melts.

"Thanks for the ride."

Oh. They're at Kenzie's house now. There was a red light, Kara's pretty sure. Stop signs. Safe bet.

Kenzie was playing with the curl of hair that slipped out from under her headband. She's sure of that. The blue of the bowling alley lights glanced off her hair -- it was shiny with hairspray -- and it made a green flicker. Like the sun setting through the pine trees near the beach. Except it was the stupid bowling alley's beer sign and it was Kenzie."

"I had a really nice time, Kara."

_Say things. Alex says girls like when you say nice things._

"So."

"So. See you at school tomorrow?"

Kenzie unbuckles, puts her hands on Kara's cheeks and kisses.

"You smell nice," she murmurs. "Like candy."

"Ah, well, it's probably all the candy I eat..."

"Kara. Shut up."

There's a shirt in the backseat now. This is fine. It's not like Kenzie is...

"Half-naked."

Kenzie laughs again. That's twice. 

"What, you never seen a boob before?"

"Um, do mirrors count?"

"You're adorable. So _easy_ and innocent. I'm so glad I got to you first!""

The seat moves back -- Alex _lies --_ and apparently so does the thing in the center where the maps go. Kenzie gets up and starts unzipping her dress and she hits the button in the steering wheel that Alex said meant 'engage rocket boosters' and Kara scrambles to grab her. Protect her.

There's just a honk.

_Alex lies._

"Glad to see you woke up, surfer girl."

Kenzie is _everywhere_ and she is warm and the dress is in the backseat now too.

"Hands here," Kenzie instructs.

Kara nods. Good. Yers. Good. Nodding makes Kenzie laugh and her boobs shake.

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

It's all gone. It took four years for all the noise to go away. She still has her vision because she can see Kenzie's heartbeat. Quick-quick-quick, going up into the vein that goes up into her neck.

"S'okay, Kara. Touch me."

Kenzie looks down, her green eyes sparkling in the floodlights over the basketball hoops.

_Is it weird to say a girl's heart looks really pretty pumping? Probably. Alex didn't warn me about it. But she didn't say they liked it either._

_Better not go there._

Kara wants to kiss right where the vein goes up the jaw to the lips. 

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

"Really like my, neck, huh? Go on. Hickey away. I've got swea-AHFUCK!"

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

"You move fast when you want something, huh? Wow. That's...ooh. Where in the balls did you OHMYGOD!"

Kenzie doesn't taste like candy. She tastes like salt and lotion and _Kenzie_ and when Kara kisses harder the skin gets warmer and her vision stops for a minute, not just her supersenses.

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

"Kara, stop! Jesus. Easy, you sexy vampire."

_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_  
_Thump-thump-thump!_

"Did I hurt you?"

"Whew. No, it was nice. Just. Fast. Never thought I could get so close without...never mind. Kinda look like you got your lips caught in a pool drain though. S'cute." 

"Thanks?"

"Kara," Kenzie whines. "Shut up. You're making _me_ nervous now."

The zipper on Kara's pants is definitely going down. That's happening. Kenzie's moving Kara's hand somewhere warm. That's also happening. Kenzie's heart is going faster but she's breathing less and it would really help if Eliza would talk to her about things like this in a useful way. The books didn't say whether it was okay for a partner's heartbeat, the diameter of her aorta on each beat and her breathing to be moving in an inverse rhythm. Or for the electrical activity in her nerves to spike just before her breathing becomes shallow. 

Kenzie's whole body is dancing and Kara sees it all. A universe. Stars and comets and nebula and bones and skin, shaking and shivering. Lungs, soft and pink and tender, filling and emptying. Blood and heart, hot and red and racing. Nerves tickled with lighting up and down Kenzie's spin and a storm gathering in her brain. 

All of it set to the tune of Kenzie's pulse.

She just doesn't know if it's right and she wants Kenzie to feel good.

Kenzie isn't much help because it's all Kara's name over and over.

"Fuck. Crap. I think I just got my period. No fun. Kara, Kara, Kara. Stop."

Kara looks at her hand. It's slick and warm and there's a bit of blood on it.

"Oh. Sorry."

"You did fine. I am going to _rock your world_ next week after soccer. Catch this, Goalie."

Kenzie smacks her butt.

"Kicker," Kara teases.

Kenzie laughs. That's three times. Kara's not dead. Progress.

"Kara...why did you bring a glow-stick from the roller derby?"

"Didn't."

"What do you me-WHATTHEFUCKISTHAT! GET IT AWAY FROM ME!"

 _"Arrosh,"_ Kara replies. "I think."

"The what now?"

" _Arrosh_. It's from inside me."

"Uh-huh. That seaweedy, bright-fucking-turquoise thing that is sneaking out of your pants and curling around my hand and tickling with little feeler things is _you?"_

"Yes," Kara gulps. "You feel good. Felt warm. Felt wet. Taste good. Smell good. _Really good_."

"Not funny, Kara! You know how Mike used to play pranks!"

Kara opens her eyes and Kenzie is crying and blue light is dancing around the entire car and Kara's confused and she wasn't playing a prank but saying that is the opposite of helpful. 

Humans can be like that, even when she is telling the truth. Alex didn't lie to her about that. Not the _really big_ stuff. That's when Alex never lies. It's why Kara loves her so much.

Kenzie is gone, running inside with only half her own clothes on.

Kara's confused and crying and supersenses aren't going to get the car home in one piece, not if she's crying.

So she zips up her jeans, pulls down her shirt, dabs some of Kenzi's clear, fragrant juices off her lap with a napkin and leaves the car.

She cries.

She walks.

She cries more.

She walks further.

She visits the spot Kenny took her stargazing before she died. The last time she lost someone she liked it was Kenny. At least Kenzie wasn't murdered. Is that progress?

Rao's light takes twenty-seven years to reach earth. The tiny flicker of Krpyon's destruction will barely darken a pixel on a telescope's camera. A few more years. Does the Father Rao live in the star, or is he an idea, carried only in the people? What does it say that he took billions of others into his light in an instant, in one great act of forgiveness and sent _her_ away to Earth?

Doesn't matter.

Rao is not answering her questions anymore.

\-----

Kara keeps lists. It helps. She has notebooks stuffed full of things about Earth. Maybe, someday, she will feel normal with humans and she won't feel like that David Attenborough guy watching animals he doesn't really understand. Then she can throw them away. When she gets home, she adds new observations. Sometimes she labels them.

Fun: Kenzie laughing.

**Really** fun: Kenzie laughing while naked on my lap.

Not fun: Kenzie running inside while pulling her shirt on.

Feels like Krypton blew up again: Kenzie quitting the soccer team.

Six weeks later she writes down a new one.

Feels like it would be better if Krypton had blown up again: Throwing up her favorite breakfast. Three times. In front of Alex. On New Year's.

Two weeks after that, Eliza stops speaking English, Kara is pretty sure.

Progesterone.

Implantation.

Morning sickness.

Past partners.

Unprotected sex.

It all half makes sense but Kara keeps shaking her head because what Eliza's asking: did a boy from school ejaculate into her, thus fertilizing her eggs? That's no. Kara's fairly sure human sperm cells could not penetrate Kryptonian cellular lining, ovum or otherwise in a red-sun system. Not without mechanical assistance. Eliza took her scratch paper so she's not one hundred percent sure.

In a yellow-sun system, no technology humanity has can penetrate her cells. 

_I'm baby proof!_ Kara realizes. _Talk about a superpower_

"There's a lot we don't know, Alex. It could be parallel symptoms. It could be that Infernian flu. Dr. Berber had three patients in his street clinic this week."

"Infernian flu would cause heat vision flare-ups, in a Kryptonian. Primary symptom. But only after photo-organelle poisoning from overexposure and only for a few seconds before it killed me," Kara mumbles. "I would have to be in the outer core of the star for several years in a fugue state to be that overexposed."

'See, my supersister from a planet that knows about that virus says it's not the flu. Doesn't make sense, mom. She's never been with a guy. They way they act, the way those ratfucking football players look at her? I'd hear their older brothers bragging about it at Stanford.'

"Alexandra, language! What do you want me to say, baby girl? I'm only saying what it might be and we don't have hormonal tests, we don't have baseline temps. Kara has more of her species knowledge stuffed in there than JSTOR, the Library of Congress and Wikipedia combined but we don't ask the _patients_ do to the work, Doctor Danvers."

"Really, mom? You're spring the residency on me? Because if it is my residency or protecting Kara? Hell, if it's my fucking license or protecting Kara? Don't you dare tell me I would pick my career!"

"Alex, calm down. We don't have basic first aid texts. We're spitballing here."

Eliza groans.

"What I'm sure of is I am going to gut Clark like a fish if he turns me down for a Kelex hookup one more time."

"I could pull the data core and put it in an optical component bath," Kara suggests. "We could put Kelex back together once we had the duplicate."

"I could make some in the garage freezer. I just need to go to the hardware store for some sand."

It's easier to be _not_ thinking and the best way to do that is _talking_ whenever something comes up she knows. Easy. 

"If it is, what do we do?" Alex asks, chewing her lip. 

Alex skin is grayer than it is pink right now. She's lost weight. She is _not_ sleeping enough and Kara didn't need her nightly fly-bys to check her sister's heartbeat to know that. She still did them. It was always for Kara, not Alex's benefit and she thinks Alex accepted that.

"Same as before, we love her. Maybe kill somebody for doing this to her but we love _Kara_ and whatever happens, we stick with _Kara,_ baby girl."

"I miss dad. He was better with important talks while not-yelling-at-each-other stuff."

"I miss him too. He always brought the emotional savvy to our marriage. I just push the 'love your kids' button over and over and hope it works."

Eliza laughs, softly. So does Alex.

"He was always good at keeping the Danvers women from arguing."

"Mom? Alex?"

"At what point in the human menstrual cycle does a woman's ovum exit the body?"

"Around the time bleeding starts, why?"

Kara slumps back in the chair.

"Because I'm pregnant. Mackenzie's. The dance at the roller derby. We...uh...fooled around."

"Well, as the ranking lesbian here, I'm incredibly proud. But so what?"

"So I'm pregnant."

"That makes _no sense,_ sis."

"Because she's female?" Kara grumbles. "Please. In the First Conquest, we rewrote our hox genes so heavily and packed so many artificial, highly conserved gene strings that we never logged that were not sure where we came from in the phylogenetic tree. Part of that was so that we could interbreed with and if necessary, _outbreed_ any local species. Intelligent species. Not like, horses. They're cool but not...anyway. Anything with _DNA or RNA_ if it was in a receptive state. The genitals themselves are called an _arrosh._ A bastardization of a word that means 'journey of life'. They are extensible, prehensile, and flexible. They have chemical receptors, photoreceptors, vibration receptors, all five human senses, and then some. They treat the partner's body like a lock to be picked, whatever gets a good reaction, do more, chase it, keep going. With the Codex and sex going out of style, I would have been the first Kryptonian to see mine in a long time. Well, if my eyes were open."

"So you're...what?"

Eliza's brow bunches up.

"Well, if Mackenzie's body was somehow signaling that an egg was available?" Alex suggests. "If Kryptonian uber ladybits means Kara's body can follow a chemical gradient or a hormone signature or whatever to find it?"

"What? On a tea saucer? It would have been inside Mackenzie."

Kara leans back and laughs. She claps her hands together and Eliza, Alex, and the front door all jump. The neighbor's car alarm goes off.

"I thought that was way too easy! I gave Mackenzie an..."

Kara starts snapping her fingers.

"Orgasm," Alex supplies. "Female orgasm will happen with lesbian sex. Bisexual sex, sis. Sorry. Basically a given. One of our many competitive advantages over straights, in my opinion."

"That's just it! I was barely able to breathe, Alex. I couldn't have held on to a pencil, it felt so good being kissed. So how did I just sit there like a rock barely able to move and do something even slightly complicated, like find a clitoris? But Makenzie liked it? She asked me if I brought a glow stick..."

"Kara, you're starting to worry me, baby girl."

"Eliza, do we have one of those really awful sour candies?"

"Lemon drops? Yeah. I'll...go get one. Seems to be Kara Science Hour again."

Alex grins.

"KSH is my favorite show. I have missed this, mom."

"I've missed you missing it, Alex."

"Kara, not to be weird but we did share a gym class. Nothing unusual or scary down there. Nothing that could scoop an egg from somewhere inside a girl's body in a quick bump-the-horn session."

"Alex!"

"What? It probably wasn't an all-night deal!"

"The egg is tiny and it has a uterus to hide in. I would have a damn hard time finding with three OB/GYN residents, laparoscopes, ultrasounds and a full week of looking."

"There's a saying, Alex. _Kolir threiadh arrosh_. Literally translated it's nonsense -- the journey of life touches our ancestry -- but it shows up in old texts a lot. Including old romantic epics. I think it's a euphemism. For the _arrosh_ finding a way to procreate with a fertile partner."

Eliza puts three lemon drops in her hand.

"Here."

"Please don't freak out. Mackenzie did and your my family. I need you not to be disgusted."

"Never."

"Right. You are keeping your pants on, right sis?"

"Yeah. Any membrane will do for this."

"Right...whew...I am the last bastion of House El. I am the last Lady of a High House. This is just a fucking lemon drop. How scary can it be?"

"Strongest beings in the universe and this one is terrified of lemon drops," Alex teases.

"These things are gross," Kara grumbles. "General Zod was right. Also, I have a weird reaction to them. Watch."

She crunches the lemon drops up and scrapes her tongue around the inside of her mouth.

"See?"

"Whoa. That's... _glowy_. Go turn the light off, mom."

"That's..."

"Impressive. Is that bioluminescence?"

"Uh-uh."

"It's spreading. It's not just her throat. It's...everything."

"When aroused -- fear, pain, sex, just worked up in general -- the whole body can react like this," Kara explains while trying not to close her mouth. "My skin is not as bright as other tissues but you get the idea."

"Bright blue. Little waves of reaction, more like blue-green. When she shivers, it kinda looks like a starfield."

"Please tell me I'm not floating, too?"

"You're good sis. You look amazing, Xenomorph."

"Still not sure about the nicnkame, Alleycat."

"Ouch. Noted."

\-----

"Almost there!" Eliza tells her.

Kara's hands have long since crumpled the railing of the hospital gurney to point of it being fishing wire. Her skin blazes with each contraction and each scream, angry and bright. The red sun lamps Alex jury-rigged aren't helping, her body has long since stored far too much for them to weaken her but she hopes it makes her family feel safe. Together, they blend with her own glow to give the room a sickly purple shade.

Eliza and Alex want to help, she can tell. It's just not safe to hold her hand or wipe her forehead right now.

Birth is an animal thing and the _animal_ is the dangerous part of her.

With one last scream, Kara feels something small and warm rip itself out of her and slide into Eliza's hands as she scurries forward.

"She's beautiful, Kara."

"She?"

"She," Alex confirms. "Hey, there, niece."

"Did you think of a name, Kara?"

"Yes. For a girl, _iasahkh_ after these shiny red rocks that were in the dry rivers. I used to collect them with my friends. They were hard but smooth. Strong. Like a daughter of El should be. Iasahkh Kara-El. Iasahkh, daughter of Kara, scion of El."

"Red stones? LIke a red jewel?"

"Yeah," Kara groans. "Exactly like that."

"Ruby, Kara. She's the little precious red stone you found. Ruby."

"Yeah, Alex. She is. Nice to meet you, Ruby. "

"I'll go chase down the birth certificate lady. Ruby Iasahkh Kara-El Danvers. I'll just put Ruby Iasahkh Danvers on the birth certificate, though."

"Steal a couple pages off her form pad, Alex. Please? I want there to be a copy, even if it's just for Ruby and me, with her real name in her mother tongue."

"On it!"

Eliza shushes. Ruby _shrieks_ and the light fixtures shake. Dampness splashes from Kara's nipples and this time, it's not quite so gross.

"Wow, she's _really_ unhappy that the woman holding her was just a boring old human. Here, Kara."

Eliza offers a tiny, perfect body to her, one with skin bright as her own but far, far darker in shade.

_Rao. She's marvelous. She's like an aqyte gem. So blue it's black._

One night, when Kara was achy and grumpy and couldn't sleep, she called Alex. Alex ran the math. She threw up enough over the seven months she had morning sickness that the wasted energy of it would instantly heat a swimming pool halfway to boiling. The food she kept down was far more. Enough to melt boulders. Vaporize steel. Turn sand to glass. Eating for two made Kara run hot, like she was a cross between a bottomless pit and a smelting plant.

All that, to forge a six-pound Ruby.

Ruby's little fingers are already mighty, she can tell from the way her exhausted body bends under them. She fusses and Kara tries to reposition her but she fusses again. Eliza laughs.

"Don't you worry, she's motivated. She needs to be close to her mom. Skin on skin, remember? I'll go make sure you have some time to yourselves."

"Thanks."

Kara shifts, trying to guide Ruby to her nipple.

"She'll find it. Just let her find it, Kara."

Ruby does. She closes her lips around Kara's raw, aching nipple and _sucks._ The ending of Ruby's sniffling crying makes Kara's heart still to a crawl. Her fear fades like smoke blowing away. The pain stays but a yellow sun system does have perks. Even if it always hurts exactly this bad, she'll take the trade. She slumps back in the bed. 

"Rao, that is a relief. Take all you want, precious girl. All yours. I would be really glad if you did," Kara jokes, rubbing her sweaty hands over Ruby's tiny, sticky head.

 _It's more than relief,_ Kara realizes. _It's a reason to go on. I asked Rao why I was spared._

_He answered._

"I'm yours, Ruby. Forever."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hox genes are slightly mysterious but they are highly conserved (not junk DNA) and they seem to relate to big things like overall body shape.  
> \-----  
> The phlyogenetic tree is the map of evolution on earth. For instance:  
> Multicellular->Vetebrate->Mammal->Primate->Human being
> 
> For Kryptonians to not be able to pinpoint their missing link would take massive, widespread sloppy (or just hurried) gene editing that touched everyone. No case studies.


	4. Funny How That Works

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kara and Lena settle in their new roles and make some observations.

**Kara, aged 18**

She goes back to school on the first day of the new semester, unable to get any more time.

She's leaving a three-day-old life in Eliza's arms under the gentle pulse of _proper_ inhibitor lamps and her feet she hasn't used enough while aching her still sore body to the schoolhouse steps.

History goes well. Talbot, who replaced the perv history teacher that Alex and Kara busted, is a sweet 'black' lady with pictures of her cats and her own kid and she became Kara's friend the day Kara raised her hand and asked if it should be called the black experience but there wasn't anyone calling the rest of history written by people like Kara the pink experience.

She didn't know. No one had taught racial history in Midvale before Jessica Talbot tried it.

Laughing at Kara. They're always laughing _at_ her. Ms. Talbot laughed _with_ her.

Gym is fine, she never liked it and she has a new note now. Excluded rather than just 'gentle' for her made-up cardio condition.

Science is...odd. Pregnancy shouldn't have changed it but Rao never catches only one stone when two are falling, she supposes. The triggering of whatever forgotten genes in Kara helped her find a way to her secret purpose, creating Ruby, triggered a similar epigenetic and subliminal response in her original life's work. Science. The teacher -- a sub, the old one is, ironically, pregnant -- drones on about Ph and Kara just watches because she realized something about the interplay of gravity waves and what humans misunderstand as the Casimir effect watching a droplet of his spit hit a mote of dust in the air.

_'There's no way?'_

_'Kara? Kara the nun?'_

_'That's what they say.'_

_'Fuck off, Winn. She's lying. Does that look like a girl who just popped one out?'_

Kara wants to go over, grab Tiffany and shake her. Yes, Kara suffered and Rao knows it hurt but there is a child in a bedroom three miles from here that means _everything_ and is worth more to her than every human who was ever born, whoever died, whoever will be born or whoever will die. Who carries an immense tradition on her name but will carry it with her _Jeju_ because that is the point of the family. She wants to grab Tiffany and shake her and explain all this, slap her and scream El Mayarah over and over because the meaning of it lives in her guts now, now her head. Ruby needs her now but that will change, slowly. She'll learn to feed herself and walk and dress herself and Kara will be there, always. Until it means Ruby is grown and choosing to let her be there.

Both of them will need each other in the long, yellow-sun drenched years to come. Stronger together.

_'Please don't be gross about it, Tiff. Maybe she just stayed active or whatever.'_

_'Whatever, fag. If that's what it takes for you to want a woman? All used up? Be my fucking guest.'_

Vickie leaves Winn's table like a storm, almost sending creamed corn everywhere all over Winn and finally opening a single solitary place to sit. Winn looks as confused right now as Kara felt when Kenzie ran, crying, from the warmest, safest, happiest feeling Kara ever experienced. Second happiest. Ruby found a way to sleep. Kara hold her, chest to chest.

"Hi. Winn right?"

She gestures towards the seat across from him. He nods.

"You're going to _willingly_ sit next to the fag?"

"Winn, don't."

"Oh, wow. Props. I mean, kind of new and people _say you don't get references_ and so I sort of thought...never mind."

"Those," Kara sighs. She looks around. These are wicked creatures, she decides. They want to make her ashamed, weaken her, so she cannot protect her daughter. "Those I learned. So I can make sure my daughter never hears herself called one. There was a book. Really sad book."

That's how Kara makes her third friend. Alex is her sister, that's something beyond and above. Kenny and her had no time to decide what exactly they were. Kenzie and her did but Kara came to a different answer than Kenzie.

"A book."

"Yeah. _Slurs: Weaponized Words in the Western World._ Interesting."

Kara takes one of her special 'protein bars' out of her pocket and cracks it, sprinkling the dust over the bowl of oatmeal she brought.

_Artificial strawberry flavor crystals in a fractal lattice containing half a ton of nutri-plasm hidden from Earth's gravity well._

Kara finally found a food she's not crazy about. It's fine. She needs this for Ruby and her crazily increased baseline metabolism. Plan A for getting enough calories would have punched through the cheap table, the floor, the basement and by her guess, two-thirds of the Earth's mantle.

"It's my diet secret," Kara mumbles when she catches Winn watching.

"Your body, your rules. Just haven't seen a homemade protein bar that sparkles before."

They talk. Winn's a senior, like her. He's from Coast City which means Midvale is the stone ages. There's no GSA club, no farm co-op, only Starbucks for coffee. The NAACP has three local members. One's six. Kara takes out her smartphone -- Eliza didn't just relent, she _insisted_ even if the excuse was lactation apps and emergencies -- and sort of stares at it.

"First phone?"

"Yeah. This cannot be a computer," she mumbles, turning it over in case whatever makes them so game-changing is a liquid that will drip out.

"Want some help?"

"Please, Rao, yes. These are not what I'm used to."

"What are you used to. Your accent is news to me."

"Icelandic."

Winn glances up at her.

"That totally tracks."

"Huh?"

"Blonde, big..."

He grabs his own bicep and joke-flexes through his button-up.

"Steals the women and eats sheep."

"Sheep are cute," she huffs. "They just stand there and be fluffy. Not get eaten."

Winn laughs.

"Wanna skip math?"

"Rao, yes. American math is taught backward, upside down, and stuffed up a _talaq's_ crack.'

"I'm not sure what Rao or a talaq is but...agreed. Respect."

He offers a fist bump. She accepts.

Kara shovels gravity-compressed oatmeal into her face and Winn shows her how to boot up the phone.

_'See, you gotta peel this off.'_

_'Jailbreak? You want to? No offense but do you know what that is?'_

_'So the government can't...'_

_'Right, to disable the GPS. Yeah. We're gonna be friends, I can tell.'_

Winn and her are going to be friends, she can tell.

That's day one.

\-----

Day two is easier.

\-----

Day ten is when it gets hard. Ruby has started to open her eyes and Eliza calls, bawling, because something's wrong. Kara's flight home must have broken four hundred windowpanes. 

Eliza sniffs. Kandoori hymns of rest and contemplation and Kara's levitating swish around the room with Ruby in her arms quiet her almost immediately. Never changing her angle, Kara floats over to the small bed that's in here for her.

"Well, we might as well have a snack, huh, precious girl?"

Eliza looks tired -- they all do, even Alex on the phone _looks tired_ somehow -- but she also looks like she lost and argument.

"Heh. The nurse at the hospital was right about you. You're natural with her, Kara."

"Could you grab the pump? She is not _that_ hungry and I am _that sore."_

One problem with an unstoppable infant is it does what it wants, mostly. Left? Three days in a row? Even Kara can't dislodge her easily.

"Sure, baby."

Eliza comes back with the pump, the stasis chamber, and the bottling casks.

"Should have made myself clear. She wants her mom, is all. She should go with you, tomorrow. Just."

"Grandmothering is exactly like they said. I want to do everything. Be with her, every second I can."

Kara nods.

"And now you have to let her go, a little bit."

"You get it, Kara. You always will, I think. You shouldn't have had to so young but..."

Many a sentence is left half unspoken now between her and Eliza. Hints. Mother-to-mother emptiness that wait until one fo them fills it with words that would fill libraries if written down.

"But you can teach me."

"Sleep-float with her. She likes that."

Kara yawns. What Ruby likes, Ruby gets.

\-----

Day eleven is confusing. 

"Oh, Kara!" Winn swoons. "She's adorable."

He met her at the door.

All day Ruby bounces and burbles and laughs softly. Held on her hip, it's easy as walking now. She doesn't let the daycare take her. Ruby is fine. Kara can still learn. She has a lap when she needs to write quiz answers. The beanie Kara knitted hides the power dampener. It's just enough for the dangerous ones. She still can't let anyone else hold her. Several girls swarm around her. Three of them had been the ones saying nasty things along with Vicki.

"That's sort of spooky, how green her eyes are. Cute."

"Hey, can we talk?"

Kara turns.

"Winn, can you find me somewhere to talk to Kenzie?"

Kenzie is angry. Kara is _enraged._

"You're mad?" Kara scoffs. "You think I didn't give _you_ enough warning? That's rich."

She probably sounds like Lex did when he hijacked TVs to rail about Superman.

"I mean, you landed on your feet, obviously."

Kenzie nods toward Ruby.

"It's what, eight and a half months back? Guess you found someone else to walk home with."

Winn is standing guard.

"Winn, lock the door, please."

"Kenzie I have never been with and maybe never will be with another lover. That night, that was my hope. You. Only you, forever. I was falling in love with you. Still haven't figured out how to stop."

"I don't... I'm confused. That's a baby, Kara."

"Well spotted," Kara huffs.

"You're eighteen."

'Well counted."

"You're cute, not crazy. No fertility clinic would take that on, not for all the money ever. I'm going to avoid getting punched in the face and say you know how babies are ma-oh."

Kenzie just stops. Moving, talking, breathing, she just stops. Kara actually glances, uses her supersenses to check her heart is still beating.

"Yeah. I do."

"C-c-can I see her eyes?"

Kara nods.

"Green. Like my mom."

_And you, Kenzie, and your older sister, and your aunt. Every woman in your family has those magical green eyes._

"Green, Kenz."

It's not said and Kenzie probably can't admit it but it's poked at. Ruby is a miracle by Earth standards, something impossible, like some off-key version of a virgin birth. The truth is she's not the miracle they think she is. She's better.

"If you'll excuse me, I have a daughter to raise. Alone."

Winn unlocks the door without her needing to ask.

\-----

College rejection letters piss Eliza off more than they do Kara.

"No. Just, no, Kara!"

"Eliza, it's fine. Community college, whatever. It's not actually going to matter much. I need the degree, I know the statistics. I'll be translating it into my terms, mostly doing my own education wherever I go."

"Kara. These test scores? Unless they invented a number between 1599 and 1600 I haven't heard about and one between 35 and 36, these are perfect. I should have Harvard, Stanford and MIT camped in the front yard with a _fucking net_ for these. Any mother would be proud as I am."

"No mother is as proud as you are, Eliza. It's kind of your thing."

"That's fair. Fucking chasing you, I swear to God."

Earth swears aren't _Ruby_ swears, they all agreed.

Eliza calls an old friend. Yells at him for an hour. Tells him to call someone else. Who calls someone else. It must be like the barking chain in _101 Dalmations_ , Kara thinks. She called one friend who she yelled a and he passed it on, angrier and angrier until it reaches whatever target in academia Eliza picked.

Kara's more interested in the movies. Human universities are secretive, illogical, and make things harder than they need to be. She wrote out a plan of which Disney movies to watch with Ruby, when she was old enough they would make Kara cry more than Ruby did. That comes earlier.

Bambi. That nightmare can wait until Ruby's twenty-one and can go buy her mom a drink.

There's a small, expensive college on Catalina island. Tiptree Academy.

It's new, glitzy, the coffee is organic. The dorms are open-plan and the rooms bare brick and there's paint in the student welcome packets. Each dorm has a rooftop greenhouse. It's all very Northern California, very Portland, very surfer-stoner chic, very the old way must be wrong because it's old Silicon Valley mentality. It has the best program for _the exact sort of degree_ Kara wants.

They toured it and Kara joked that the sunlight there would probably make it hard to not knock holes in things.

Three days later, Harvard sends her an apology and a note begging Eliza not to sue for Title IX sex discrimination which Kara is sure she will do anyway. Tiptree sends her a full-ride scholarship. Eliza finds her an apartment.

The only difference is Harvard is four hundred years old, hardened and stiff and proud and Tiptree's first class of graduates are not even ten years back, some just earning their doctorates. It has no coat of arms. It's named after a science fiction author who lived her whole life in secret. Wrote in secret under a man's name, loved in secret. 

Harvard can be old fashioned. Harvard can try to punt her to nearby women's colleges with as much ivy on the bricks. Harvard can hope a single mother will be fooled by dates of founding and the names on residence halls at other colleges. Harvard can be squeamish because this whole _female student problem_ had been the whole point of Radcliffe, after all.

Tiptree can't be squeamish. Doesn't even want to try.

So she loses Winn -- he's going to MIT, they jumped up and down and screamed about it together -- and Alex makes loud grumbly noises into her pillow when Kara tells her that Stanford didn't want her. Maggie, because it's still Maggie for Alex, hangs up on 'puppy Danvers' so they can sleep.

Kara did something amazing because Ruby is something amazing.

People are ashamed of that.

Earth is broken. Rather, humans are.

Ruby is what makes Kara see it. Maybe mothers are more protective that way.

Funny how that works.

* * *

**Lena, aged 25**

Bizarrely, creating a pornography company with stables of cute queer actresses makes it far, far harder for Lena to get laid. There's no concealing what Third Sex Productions is, not that she cares. People outside the industry act like they should get an AIDs test after shaking hands with her. 

She hasn't had someone swipe right on her in two years.

Inside?

Inside is a paradise of female flesh. Inside are _employees._

Providing a safe space for alien and metahuman performers cornered the market on a quickly growing, much-discussed, much-lamented new human fetish. 

The Senate demanded she explain herself. So she brought diagrams of non-human sexual anatomy. Ted Cruz asked what she was doing to the children of America. She uncovered the diagrams and said 'teaching them to enjoy this' and they changed their minds. She probably won't be invited back.

Lena is fine with that.

The money comes in piles and Lena takes just a slice. Not like she's buying anyone dinner, lately and the lawyers needed to protect her staff, maintain her corporation against stubborn government lawyers and find holes in immigration law so her performers can stay are maddeningly expensive. If the cameras weren't provided at-cost by Mirage, she'd be doomed.

She keeps up the show. She acts like she's bedded more girls than Hefner. She takes actresses as 'dates' to industry events.

Lena is fine with that.

She lives for the _cut_ into the delicate underbelly of ashamed, frigid, boring middle Amerca. That's when she really gets to scare people.

Like tonight. Tonight she swanned past the slack-jawed paparazzi with a white-skinned, lightning clad punk goddess on her arm. Livewire might have popped a couple camera's circuit boards soaking up all the ego boost she got. People asked about Livewire's dress and the designer and asked Lena how she was still alive arm in arm with Livewire at her flashiest, sparkiest, most stupidly pleased with herself.

She liked that question. She turned up the sleeve of her wafting, wind-swept black dress.

_'I didn't just get here on my good looks. Faraday cage quilt, graphene mesh. I always preferred sleeved dresses anyway.'_

"Leslie?" 

"Hmm?"

"Go fuck that waitress already. I'm going to die laughing here."

Leslie is quick. Efficient. Silent. Only a gay woman would have caught those signals. The girl's boss looks dumbfounded when someone else takes her tray of champagne three minutes later. Three minutes fourteen seconds. 

"Well done, Leslie. Beat your median time," Lena chuckles to herself.

Lena's knowledge of seducing women has grown leaps and bounds by osmosis on Friday nights when the whole office goes out drinking. She has a family now. That's what really matters.

Finds the perfect table just when the overhead lights start snapping and flickering strangely.

"Steve, Christopher, Taika, Tom. Seat taken?"

Tom Hanks pulls out a chair for her. Tom Hanks. She's never been ashamed of the industry or even of her own work as a prostitute but this is still _something._

This is another glance back at the maybe-life she might have lived. These are the sort of elbows Luthors get to rub. At least, they used to. Lillian is gone, dead of cruelty-related heart failure. Lex is broken in ways she never realized, however much she loves him. Superman may not have been ready but he had help. Over before it began, really. Luthor Manor on Roosevelt Island is hardly the cruelest place for lifelong confinement. She called the lawyer's burner phone he gave her, asked for some files ordered him to gut the company quietly. Looked them over, wrote up a stack of recommendation letters that filled a ream box and went to the post office.

Let it burn.

Maybe in ten years Luthor will be synonymous with strap ons, not steelworks. Maybe that's her revenge.

Spielberg goes scrambling away from the -- gasp -- _adult_ filmmaker that just slid her industry-sullying ass into the next seat over. A silver-haired Italian woman she doesn't know, Kristen Stewart and Ellen Page replace him and round out the gaps. Leslie won't be back. Unless she zaps that girl's clit -- more than is enjoyable -- and that's why she has the emergency number.

Tom is charming. Rita is polite. Taika is clearly loving the discomfort of the old-growth industry figures around him in an ever-widening radius.

' _I can't believe she came.'_

_'The nerve.'_

_'They should have checked further.'_

The night rolls on. Stewart's move memorializing and ionizing the queer Russian feminist wins documentary, as it should. Ellen's return to superhero fare doesn't win but that was always an extreme longshot. She shrugs and her wife, an inhumanely graceful creature, peels her off to dance. If she didn't know which one was the professional dancer, she'd never guess.

She pulls out her phone.

Leslie is up.

 _Shock to the System_ is up.

Now would be an excellent time for the metahuman abuse survivor who lived that story to get her ass back here in case they win. Leslie, is, apparently, more in a position to Snapchat nudes of still-arcing skin -- storm-cloud silver and flushed pink -- and comment that clit piercings with loops are the best invention ever. A monogrammed clamp and a grounding wire trails off - probably to the sink -- taking most of the voltage away from her playmate. She somehow managed to pull in a passerby.

"The winner of short biographical film is...Shock to the System."

"Oh."

Lena probably doesn't match Charlize's grace tonight as she wobbles to her feet. She could never match Vanessa Redgrave's or Helen Mirren's if she loved a thousand years. 

Here, her girlhood crushes were deified. Placed in the heavens as artistic legends.

Here, she is an intruder.

Here, she is finally at a loss for words.

' _Look at her. Nothing prepared. All she brought with her is a whore.'_

The speech writes itself after that. She will have to have Kevin Sorbo killed but Mercy Grave's phone number is back at her house.

"I know that except for at least sixty-three voters in the category, none of you want me here. I will be brief. I won't thank you. I won't beg. I won't simper. I won't fall on my knees, enraptured at your generosity."

"This is a story. This is my best friend's story. The story contained queer sex. So did my friend's story. I just heard someone whisper about my friend. Whore. It's a word, like any other. Meant to dimiss a woman. If you think this movie was well directed? That was the whore. Well framed? Clever camera work? That was the whore. Well-chosen cast members? Again, that was the work of my best friend. _The Whore."_

A truly terrified looking stage member takes the envelope. Sensing that they will be talked about on the morning shows, they hand her a prop Oscar. She shakes it at her captives.

"You're hypocrites. You're clutching your pearls because there is some uncrossable chasm between pornography and cinema but there isn't. One is filth, no matter how it is written, shot or compiled. One is art until proved otherwise. Well, somewhere in this room, a majority of your colleagues voted for the artistic choices of a whore who put this together as a passion project. Tweaked a scene. Changed an angle. Built this _film_ along the way to what was, for her, just...more... _pornography_."

" _Shock to the System_ contained sex. _Rocky_ contained boxing. _The Shining_ contained murder. _Saving Private Ryan_ triggered multiple World War II vets with its portrayal of Normandy. All of them are great films. The Best Picture winner last year contained nineteen beheadings, three guttings, four ghastly, violent rapes and I believe one bare breast. A sweeping historical masterpiece. Edgy. Groud-breaking. Accurate. Et cetera. It was, I admit, an excellent treatment of the Achaemenid Persian conquests of the near east in the fourth century BC. I adored that movie. Saw it three times. Took a friend who teaches Classics at MIT to it."

"Our movie contained four breasts and two vaginas and emotional abuse rather than physical violence. One breast, four breasts. The only reason I can think that _Xerxes_ deserved a glide path and we deserved to be mocked from limo to my table? Breasts. Want a sound bite? Here. Fuck violence. Enjoy sex. Tell stories."

"Violence isn't more worthy or creative then sex. It isn't more kid-friendly. Most children will never snap someone's neck. They will drop an F-bomb at some point as a teeanger. That's an R rating. Nearly all children seeing a PG-13 film right now will in fact, someday. have sex. Should our daughter's heroes be soldiers or seductresses? Should our sons look up to skilled killers or skilled kissers?"

"Get over yourselves. Take the rating system out back and shoot it. Think about what _actually_ makes something too much too soon for a child. Crazy idea? Ask a child psychologist."

"Violence is not better or more meaningful than sex. Which would you rather happened to _you_ on your way home tonight?"

"All stories deserve their day in the sun. I expect all the films we submit in the future -- and we will submit -- to receive full consideration. Good night."

Tom Hanks blinks at her. His browser has crashed.

Kristen Stewart laughs into her champagne.

Taika has a napkin in his hands that he's madly gesturing for her to read.

_'Thor 5. Call me.'_

Leslie nods from where she's helping a liquified server -- discretely switched into street clothes so her boss won't find her -- into an edge seat.

No one says a word to her the rest of the night unless she starts the conversation.

Someone said it to their faces. Said the quiet part loud. Called them on their Puritanical bullshit. On camera. On live TV. Where they can't just say 'she's wrong' to her face.

Now they're ashamed.

Funny how that works.

Tom Hanks is a gentleman. He still congratulates her and pulls her seat back out.

He thinks before he talks. Makes him good company.

Funny how that works.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lena submitted "Shock to the System" under her own name, not her company's to get it past the intern-level googling meant to keep adult films out. She did so using a much-shortened version that cut all but two of the sex scenes. It showed in three theaters in New York, one in Portland and one in Howard, Texas due to a clerical error in ordering the wrong title. This time, Sen. Cruz knew better than to ask her to explain herself.  
> \-----  
> Lena is going to get a second chance at Ted Cruz. There will be blood.


	5. The Sacred Profane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kara gives tutorials of many kinds, there was once sex on Krypton, and Sam is done a startle. Repeatedly.

**Kara, aged 19**

Lois visits for Ruby's six-month mark. Kara has settled into her classes. Ruby has settled into dorm life. Kara's roommate likes Ruby and likes that Kara will take Ruby for a walk any time when there's a sock on the door. Red sock, come get the baby. Black sock, thanks for taking her and don't come back.

Ruby's a hit. How the child keeps her superhearing in check, Kara has no idea. Maybe it's all just sound, without meaning. 

Kara's roommate is Mackenzie. She decides that this one is Mack. Mack agrees. There's going to be a lot of Mackenzies, Dakotas and Madisons in the future. 

"Hi, Mack."

Lois has just settled Jon on her own chest for what she calls a 'leak and bitch' bonding session.

"Oh hell, no. Kara. Cover up. Free the nipple and all but some of us are human. Some of us have post-baby body issues. Do you have anything to say for yourself?"

"I made a baby? My body changed to be better suited to that."

"Yeah, you went from supermodel giraffe with a stylish bump to life-sized fertility idol. The platonic ideal of breasts. The distilled concept of womanly curves. Why in Jesus' asscrack do you _still have abs?_ "

"They're less pronounced! Ruby sleeps on them so they have to be softer. And Ruby needs food too, you know."

"What does she eat? Asymmetry? Sag? Cellulite?"

"Lois! I have stretch marks!"

"Cute freckly ones in weird patterns. Tiger stripes made of leopard spots. It's just...ugh. Put that away, I'm a married woman."

Kara throws a pillow at Lois and puts a sweatshirt from the hamper on top of her. No putting it on, just putting it on top. She makes a face. Lois makes one back. Lois is _such_ a big sister. Kara would know.

That's where thy are when Mack walks in. Lactating and laughing and Lois had told her about the most recent Super thing Clark did. Tipped over a minivan after preventing it from crashing. The clumsy is leaking over into the Superman side. Lex was the last of the big-deal threats. Seeing him go down in flames made the sane villains reconsider and the crazy ones went out in blazes fo stupid with the full League closing in. Batman actually, finally, had to go to therapy. Now it's all kittens up trees and Cheetah running off in a panic and having to be returned to Diana. Lois recommended a Swiffer to a red-faced Amazon because apparently feral cat goddesses and tabbies react similarly to being startled out of sleep by a Hoover.

"That's Lois Lane!" Mack shrieks.

"Yes. Mack, Rao, chill out."

"She has a baby."

"I do."

"So, this is happening. You do realize I'm a writer, Kara. Pen is mightier and all that. Lois' pen is a thermonuclear arsenal. This is like asking me to watch Mary nurse Jesus, okay?"

"This one, Short Stack. I like her. She makes my ego all tingly and fluffy."

Lois tugs the quilt over Jon and past her own face before Mack just drops dead.

"I"m married to Kara's cousin."

"That big ox of a city beat reporter."

"That big ox. He opens pickle jars and he cooks and did give me this little ox, so..."

"Are you watching _Extreme Home Makeover?"_

"No?" Kara lies around her ice cream spoon. "They're too little for Game of Thrones. Even my little space princess."

Mack figured out two breakfasts in that Kara wasn't normal. She's chill about it. She helped Kara put pillows on the ceiling, even. Just in time. Ruby sleep flew the third night and sort of wafted around until she ended up on Mack's chest. Mack was crying in the morning. Definitely feeling things.

Mack plops on the last seat on the couch.

"Oh, this is going in my memoirs!" Mack crows. "Scoot. Gimme whatever pint is unopened."

Mack is great. Maybe the straight Mackenzies are just _better_ than the gay ones.

\-----

Alex calls one night. Sounds drunk. Tells Kara that Maggie left her. She's at her apartment, so she's safe. Kara flies over with her niece. 

"Hi," Alex slurs, tickling Ruby's tiny fingers tip-to-tip so that she can't grab and break anything. "No, not Ruby drink."

"What happened, Alleycat?

"Ruby, kind of. She didn't want kids, I knew that. I didn't know that she would get _jealous_ of me spending time with Ruby, at least a little. I didn't know she would lose her entire mind about me talking to straight friends about how their kids were early on."

"Then she's not for you, Alex. You're a great aunt. You're going to have a terrifying kid someday. Mommy-daughter riflery competitions. Paintball birthday parties."

"And that's enough booze. Hard cider? Bottles? You're butch, Alleycat. We get it."

"Thanks, Xenomorph. Can you stay here, a while? Just be my sister? Be someone who won't run off?"

"Always. Plan S."

\-----

Straight Mackenzies don't break hearts but they do cause trouble. They insist Kara 'go out' and 'live it up' and that's kind of weird because the ground has better places to live than the sky does.

Kara is at a student paper party the second time a girl climbs into her lap. She's named Shae and she is long and smooth and soft. Not too drunk. They've been flirting, kind of. Shae's been looking and Kara's been catching her and smiling back.

Now there are long legs over hers and a dress bunched up over her hands so no one can see Kara' grabbing and squeeing Shae's ass and Shae is laughing about the beer being cold against her butt.

"Hi.":

Shae shamelessly grabs Kara's biceps. She must have taken her underwear off because she's stuffing a bra in Kara's front pocket and a wad of wet lace in her back pocket.

"Wow. Want to go somewhere dark and do something _bad?_ "

Kara does.

They do.

Shae doesn't care. Shae not only tolerates the _arrosh_ , she enjoys it and Kara learns that the _arrosh_ does other things. It winds around Shae's palm playfully and she pets it and tugs on it softly and Kara yelps it's so good and Shae talks to it like it's a separate being. She tucks it back in and slides three fingers in and curls them _up_ against a soft spot and Kara forgets to breathe. She collects the ribbons and they braid together into one larger thing and Shae puts it in her mouth and _Rao be merciful_ it's warm and hot and soft and Kara can see Shae's throat lit from within with a blue-white pulse. Like a searing white star. Shae _swallows_ and _sucks_ and Kara bends at the waist, broken and panting and spilling _something_ in the soft, clinging channel of Shae's throat.

"That was different," Shae teases, licking glowing violet slime from her lips and fingers. "Good different."

Shae brings her up, high, breathless, over the cliff and drops her and catches her and does it all again. After a few head-spinning freefalls Kara's skin goes from pink to glowing tropical-sea blue and Shae kneels back, watching. Saying nothing but her mouth dropping open.

"That's amazing," Shae finally says. "You're amazing." Tiny little tendrils no bigger than the soft hair on the back of Shae's neck sprout all over and reach for warmth in the cool hallway. Shae's fingers brush them and it's enough to almost scream it's so hot.

Kara learns a lot. She touches Shae with her hands and her mouth. Ruby is surprise enough.

Kara forgot to kiss her. Next time, they _only_ kiss and Kara learns that a woman's mouth is hot and slick and _perfect_ for making her moan and start to lose her breath and she's the perfect one to share her breath, put it back from her tireless body into her lover's mouth when she _thinks_ she needs air. Shae shudders and moans, deep in her ribs, when Kara doesn't free her lips but does fill her lungs with air-cooled by dash of freeze breath. It's like scuba diving. Kara is her oxygen.

Kara learns a lot. She learns how to enjoy herself while looking pink and human when Shae brings her ex into the mix. She learns how to have Shea mount her without bumping the horn of Kara's beat-up Subaru. She learns that sex in the ocean is iffy, sex in the sand is bad and gritty and sex on a sea-water dampened towel is the correct way to have sex in the surf.

It lasts for a while. Shea has to go for a year abroad and she jokes that 'Kara sex is too good to hoard for myself' and maybe she can watch Ruby sometimes. That's that. It's more than enough. It's hope.

\-----

**Kara and Ruby, age 19-30 and age 1-11**

Alex makes time from her FBI job to go to all the Ruby birthdays.

The second, when Ruby flies on purpose for the first time. When the favorite food is potsticker and the first two words are 'Jeju' and 'more'.

The third, where she learns 'Alex' and 'Eliza' and 'Kelly' who is Alex's new, much better, less messy, more grown-up, definitely likes Ruby girlfriend. She looks at Alex and Ruby and maybe wants a little Alex-shaped baby for her own.

The fourth, where they both just finished late graduation and Winn comes with his beau, a swarthy man named Jack Spheer and Ruby throws cake on the ceiling. 

Just before the fifth, Eliza calls. Jeremiah's body was found. Friendly fire, not the alien the government had him chasing. They cry and cry. 

The fifth, where everyone agrees that Ruby can't have human school. Homeschooling. Only human friends and only when her mom is watching until she has full control over her powers. Which will be quicker than Kara, probably more like Clark. Lois and Clark come too. Lois gives her advice.

"Short Stack, I ordinarily wouldn't say this. Don't get a job. Find something you can do where she's never out of your sight and do that. You didn't come across space with all this _sadness,"_ Lois tells her, pressing a finger to Kara's heart. "For nine to five and crappy insurance and a W2."

Winn's fellow is starting a business. Winn can't find work because gay engineers don't get hired on the East Coast, it seems. They give good advice. Lawyer first. Trademark second. Plan next. Don't spend when you can get freebies and always look to add something.

Jeremiah's life insurance, untouched by a too-scared Eliza, becomes a two thousand square foot plot in the hills near Palo Alto, up a bit too high for a mansion like the one just down the ridge. Kara cuts some lumber, grabs a hammer and _builds_ something. She puts a steel core under all the wood. The wildfires wiped out the last six buildings here. She makes a little citadel. Less than nine hundred feet but Kara dug greedily and deep into the soft stone. On top, in the sun, a room for Ruby, a room for her, a kitchen with a couch at one end bathroom with a tub that is in a little bay that sticks out of the cabin. She paints the walls yellow wich fades to Rao's sunset red on the ceiling. The basement is a bit bigger, since it needs a space to study and six tightly-packed bookshelves. Next, almost twenty feet down and always cool from the depth, is a den with all of the old family board games. Three workrooms in the bottom basement levels, one of them with her Kryptonian machines, her android Nysex after her grandmother and the generator and a bubble-shield generator, just in case. 

She has no idea what to do with the last two.

Not until Winn shows her the ice bucket challenge.

_That's it, that's my niche._

Kara fires up a YouTube account, puts cameras in the lower two workshops and goes to work. She does cooking videos ("How to make 13 different pancakes in one pan!") and gardening videos ("Ferns are Friends") after she builds out to the edge of the property for an underground greenhouse. She uses her degree to do deep dives in the history of science and how people thought about the world. She and Winn go out when he visits and she shoots stunt videos and DIYs when she helps the neighbors for extra cash. 

Her subscribers skyrocket waiting to see what new thing she'll do. It works enough to buy a Mirage Tech camera and deepfake kit. 

One rule: Ruby does not exist. Nowhere in the videos is a scrap of evidence that she has a daughter. With the Mirage Tech, she can shoot without a babysitter. If Ruby walks on, she vanishes from the footage and Kara either waits or just keeps one eye on Ruby.

She changes one of the greenhouses into a grow house with some Kryptonian vegetables, wheat and apples. She puts in a meat-grow chamber for beef and lamb, and a crop of oats packed in on dense hydroponic shells. She puts a few flax plants in there too. They live almost entirely in their own bubble. Ruby's clothes are spun and knit from fibers grown here. Almost all their food is grown, even Kara's new protein bars that aren't _nearly so_ gross after a few revisions. They leave for walks and for Ruby to watch dogs -- too soon to safely pet -- and to buy more books. 

_'Jeju! More books!'_

_'Not more ice cream?'_

_'Books!'_

Kal has a Fortress of Solitude.

Kara has the Citadel of Isahkhk Kara-El, future Lady of El.

The sixth, here it's Alex turn to be whiny and round and grumpy and _shiny_ and they're going to name her Geri. Rather than Gertrude. Where Ruby decides she's going to be called 'cousin trouble' and tells Alex's belly that.

The seventh, where the bump is gone and Alex looks dead and empty and Kelly somehow, somehow, somehow kisses her enough and tells her it's not her fault enough that Kara knows she'll be alive to come to the next. Ruby will get to see her aunt again. Ruby has to learn about death.

For her eighth, Ruby wants a pet. Kal lets her clone a fluffy, white, square-bodied polar hound. Ruby names it Krypto and Kara feels better knowing that Ruby's new friend is just as strong and can bite just as hard as Kara can punch. She trains Krypto to fly away with Ruby if there's ever trouble and sews grab handles in Ruby's clothes. Krypto is gentle with the new dogs. Ruby learns how to be too. Kelly asks for a cat and somehow Streaky leads Kara to being a drug dealer for Kryptonianized, unbreakable pets. Cats able to scratch girders out of apartment buildings and if something lets Streaky out and something happens, cats that break truck axles and walk it off is going to come back to bite her, she just knows it.

For her eleventh, men from the government come by. Ruby is an illegal immigrant, they say. Kara reminds them she has a US Birth Certificate and is more citizen than Kara. They threaten to have it 'lost' but if Kara comes to work for them...like her father did...good man, Jeremiah. 

Such a shame.

She asks if they came alone. If she can know what agency they're from. They give her a card and a codeword. She makes them Twellian jam sweetened tea before she calls it. The person has never heard of them. The person advises she call the police.

No one will send more. If they knew what she was, they would have brought an army. This is a dice roll. Hoping for big fish on small bait. She is confident of that. 

She makes it quick. Snap of the neck before they saw her move. She buries them in the back, deep, under the redwood Ruby planted. For the massive roots it will need.

_'It will be big one day, Jeju. Almost as tall as you.'_

Ruby first. Ruby always. Ruby is hers.

\-----

The moms ask Kara how she does it. Works from home, she says, makes sure Ruby has everything she needs, sometimes more for a treat, never too much. Sets a bedtime but holds her until she falls asleep. Sets rules but lets her be mad when she enforces them and enforces anyway.

They don't believe her.

She'll be twelve soon. Basically a teenager. They tell Kara to be ready to go from hero of Ruby's life to the villian.

\-----

Kara finds lovers. It's not hard. Lots of women want Kara. She knows she's good looking and tall and she has soft hips they can sink their fingers into and she's strong enough to lift them easily and they laugh, almost every time. Most seem to want to stay a few months. Be ruby's friend. Scratch some itch about caring for a kid. Go as deep as their lives let them.

If Ruby calls them rather than her mom, Kara looks less clingy and they mostly drop everything to give her and her flat-tired bike a ride home.

Kara doesn't mind. Ruby's smart enough she figured out what's happening ages ago.

Eliza, thank god, gives The Talk. Ruby failed to get a human-style period, just like they assumed. Kenzie seems to have given good looks, green eyes and glossy black hair from some hidden ancestor who wasn't blonde like the other Friesen girls. Ruby has her sense of humor and a smaller, more muscular build. Like a dancer or a yoga nut or a soccer kicker. Nothing more. 

Kara did research -- and had experience with human women -- and gave it to Eliza who actually, bless her, wrote a kryptohavli book about sex for teenage girls, two volumes. One about boys and one about girls. What isn't in the book, Kara fills in.

_'How do I know if I like them, Jeju?'_

_'If it's worth it, you'll know, my star.'_

_'How do I know if they like me?'_

_'Ask. If they really do, they'll tell you.'_

_'How do I...'_

_'Inhibitor lamps. In your bedroom or in the car. I want you to bring them here, if...I mean when that happens. Where the lamps are.'_

_'What if they? If I'm not sure I want to?'_

_'Never. If you have to, then you may use your strength, my star. All of it. Fight back, get away, fly home. I will never be mad at you for protecting yourself or your choices. But only do that to protect yourself.'_

Ruby feels supported. Kara supposes she'll have a slightly awkward text someday. Sex didn't happen where she's from. No reason to be embarrassed really. She'll just take a walk and set the alarm system for life-signs only. Yes or no.

Then it goes wrong. 

Ruby wants Kara to help her figure out if Jake likes her, or if Talia does.

Talia does. Talia is named after her mom Sara's ex's sister. Her other mom, Ava Sharpe, has a good job with the FBI, like Alex and they work together sometimes. Alex had a one night stand with Talia's _other mom_ once. Sara. Queers. Seriously. They all know each other. Talia has it bad and she likes karate and jogging with Ruby and her mom, Sara Lance is less than helpful. 

Sara mom is a flirt with a fifty-foot, illuminated F.

Ava seems to have given up on making Sara behave except for not cheating on Ava.

Talia is a flirt and she is willing to pick her battles. Most dangerous of both moms.

\-----

For Ruby's twelfth, the money runs out. Kara is having to buy more, pay more in taxes on a scrap of land. More in wildfire insurance even though three fires have stripped the wood off and they never paid.

Kara finally gives up. Installs a protective sprinkler around the redwood. Leaves the metal layer. Paints it in gray and Ruby uses thermally-impervious paint to add blowing leaves and stormclouds. They practice getting away from the hot glass of the windows. Ruby learns where the switch is to seal the house from Earth's biosphere, including smoke. They've had to use it twice.

Kara can't get a normal job, she'd have to ditch too often to help Ruby. A normal job wouldn't pay enough anyway, slick degree or not. She goes upstairs and cries. There, blinking at her, is a red light on the Mirage Tech in the bedroom that she uses for fan questions.

Anonymity.

There is one skill she has not shared, ever, with her millions of fans. Her sundrops. She can't.

She _can_ open a Reddit account and offer to answer sex questions with humans, aliens, metas or anything else. She can program the mirage tech with a different face, red hair, and green eyes and turn her pillows and her own fingers into a steadily growing stream of income from her livestreams. Trick is to not read the comments and just offer multiple-choice polls, she soon learns.

Through the advice, she meets Sam. Sam lives in Metropolis and is the first thing that feels like maybe forever, maybe deep that Kara's had since Kenzie. 

It starts a question lots of hybrid children ask. 

_'What's wrong with my body?'_

Sam owns a Wall Street firm. A small one, she says. Reign Financial pulls down more every year than Bill Gate's mansion cost and Sam takes a fair slice and as the founder, her fair slice is _big._ She has money worries because unless your net worth is in the hundreds of millions, New York is too damned expensive. She has to waste more money on a client's lunch than Kara makes in two months and the company doesn't reimburse for months. She pays more for the fifteen hundred foot apartment each year than Kara paid for the land here which she bought _once_ and before the full the lunacy of the Bay Area market moved this far out.

Sam is making it in New York and if she can do that, she can make it anywhere. She's lonely. In her messages, she sounds small, terrified. Her last two attempts at lovers both ran screaming. Kara can relate.

After confirming their ages, Kara just offers a video chat.

"Hi," Sam whimpers.

"Hi, pretty woman talking to pillow."

"Ugh, fine. Better?"

_Much better. So much._

Sam is darkly tanned, or maybe has some mixed-race heritage. Tall, slender. With long fingers that make Kara's mind _go places_ when she twists the hem of the sheets. When Kara loosens her up with half an hour of jokes, she has a soft, soft, soft smile. Hidden treasure.

"Do you want to just show me?" Kara finally asks.

"You...you'd do that? You wouldn't be grossed out?" 

"I answered a question about safe use of piercing implantation of Pahiikan larvae for a married couple wanting to conceive," Kara reminds her. "Apparently the human dad will carry. So I'm ready for anything.":

"Okay."

Sam pulls the covers back and she's naked. That's happening. Kara wasn't really ready for a flat stomach, strong legs, small, firm breasts capped with nipples so dark they're plum purple.

"I uh, have to, uh..."

"Get turned on?"

"Yeah."

"Would it help if I took my clothes off?"

Kara, till the day she dies, will never understand how she came up with that.

"Are you into women?"

"Yes...also...wow. I want to get naked now. It'd be disrespectful if I didn't," Kara jokes, giving her best grin. The one that says _if you want I will walk you home_ and just _ask for a hug_ in one sense and in another says if _you like my kid, I'd be happy to rail you for days on end_ and make you _buckets of aftercare waffles_ and it works.

Sam nervously lets her thighs fall open. Kara follows suit after peeling her T-Shirt off.

"I can do this."

" _You can do this,"_ Kara agrees, keeping her voice low and dark as she can.

Five minutes later, Kara has popped her headphones in so she can listen to Sam's high, quiet moans. Her own mic is turned way down because she's trying to match Sam swipe for swipe and she got loud _ages_ ago.

"It'll take a while," Sam warns. "Not usually the...first one."

"Gee, I'd hate to have video sex with a gorgeous businesswoman all night."

That's it. It's sex now. It's not tutorials.

"Somewhere after her fifth orgasm, three things happen to Sam. Sam moans Kara's name (that's nice), she lifts off the goddamn bed (which is a cool trick, beats tying a cherry stem), and her skin goes blindingly bright and crimson and her _arrosh_ snakes out, long and proud waving its thin ribbons every which way and trying to find the source of it all and not realizing it's a webcam (which is glorious).

Kara's replies in kind but Sam has her eyes screwed shut.

"So, doc? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Kara manages when she can find her own words, wiping her own soaked hand on the sheets. "Sam...you're perfect. That's called an _arrosh_ and I have one too, see?"

Sam opens her eyes. Kara is floating, shiny with sweat and filling the room with an aqua gleam that shifts on the ceiling like reflections from the water.

"Kara, that's..."

"Beautiful? So are you."

Sam starts crying and hangs up.

"Crap."

\-----

It takes cajoling, texting and three candy bouquets deliver to Reign Financial with 'Your Special K' to get Sam not to close her account. It takes the magic word to get back online. Krypton. Long since famous as Superman's home planet. For many, it seems like it must be the place where gods are born.

Kara mails her an old text, hand-transcribed with superspeed to cheat. An illustrated erotic poem called the _Chaining of Cythonna_ with two goddesses, one dark and one fair, not so different than Sam and Kara, sitting close. Holding. Kissing. Their _arroshes_ twining, licking across their bellies, cording and braiding and plunging into glowing, dripping cunts, seeking welcoming mouths.

The contact name 'S is for Sexy' blinks on her phone not long after.

"Who's Ktharra?

"Well, Hi, Sam! How are you?"

"Kara, you mailed me a..."

Sams's voice goes quieter than a whisper. Somehow.

"...a _really detailed_ illustrated alien Kama Sutra. Is this a come-on?"

Kara plops the oatmeal and the tiny sirloin in front of Ruby who has never been remotely fussy. Like mother, like daughter.

"Of course it is. I mean, I did call you beautiful."

"And send you candy bouquets which, in my view, are the best kind. And sent dinner to your office."

Sam groans.

"What, Friday? That was you?"

"What girl doesn't like a great Friday night? I mean, it was the best way to buy you dinner 3,000 miles away. It was going to be dinner and a show but you never opened the link. Don't do it at work."

Sam groans again and Sam needs to make sexy groans, not...that.

"And I was so damned hungry I probably didn't read the receipts. The book. The blonde one? Ktharra?"

"I'm named after her. I was born there. Space princess, if you can believe it."

There is a pause so long and so total Kara checks to see if Sam hung up.

"Can we, again? Tonight maybe?"

"Luscious, I got all night."

They do. Kara's bedroom will glow for a week even after she washed the sheets. It's more than human detergent can do in one pass.

Sam is much more comfortable with herself, whether or not her _arrosh_ is out. Her pale, juicy channel is like a tulip hidden inside a black orchid. Kara would spend hours failing and spraining and giggling and laughing and she just _knows_ there would be a click. That sweet glide. Sam's ankle over her chest, hers on Sam's. Clashing, slipping, grinding. Scissoring is a fave, it's complicated but once it's done, Kara can just sink into it. Lazy. Slow. Perfect. Until they inevitably fall out of Kara's too-short bed. Making Ruby yell at them.

Men don't do it for her but _that_? The full, slippery, thick, cherry-red pillar of Sam's _arrosh_ wouldn't slam too deep or to tender but would the girth would shame any man alive and it would unfurl would seek out every nerve it could find even as the scrape, stretch, _burn_ as she worked it in was primal. Animal. Good burn. Like good whisky. Would have her walking funny. Kara turned on the remote control and picture-in-picture showed her where Sam pointed the webcam. Boob girl. Full stop. Sam actually would drool when she tilted down. Like she wanted the juicy, salty curve underneath.

Sam calls the next morning.

"Do I not need sleep?"

"Nope."

"The hell? I could have been doing that all night, every night, never dropping?"

"I mean, that's my lifestyle," Kara jokes.

Sam squeaks and hangs up. That's how she knows the fantasy burrowed into Sam's imagination.

\-----

Kara texts Sam a picture of Ruby's 11th birthday. She has to break the rule now before it's weird.

Sam isn't a sundrop. She's not going to blackmail or hurt Ruby.

Supposed to tell your lady about your nearly-teenage daughter before the _third_ phone sex date, right?


	6. Backdraft - Heat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where planet Earth would like to have a word with the manager, some things can't be charged to the expense account even when you're the boss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Fire Tetrahedron is a model for understanding fires and how they start:
> 
> Heat.  
> Oxygen.  
> Fuel.  
> Chain Reaction.

**Sam Arias, aged 29**

This is fine. She can do this.

There was a contact in LA who wanted to buy out a stubborn AI firm called Mirage Technologies. Use their IP to revolutionize film editing, just let the computer make the blockbuster paint by numbers. 

Mirage is privately held, squeaky clean tax-wise and beyond bulletproof. It took her three days to get the anonymized dark-web handle that became the owner's in-lieu-of on the incorporation forms. DeepMagicWitch is probably doing something either beyond sketchy or just unpopular with the tech because judges usually don't accept LLC requests and then seal the names.

He paid for a week of her time, she needed three days.

She took the leave.

She expensed the first-class ticket out. She'll buy the coach ticket back.

Every night, Kara called her in her hotel room. Told her something about Ruby. Told her something about herself. Told her what Kara was wearing (usually, not much) and asked what Sam was wearing.

Sam, nine hours later, would tell the maid not to worry about it because she is _not_ going to be charged for ruing more than one set of Marriot sheets with an ever-growing stain of red and white crusting. Her own juice, a strange blend of secret and alien and ordinary as any other woman who spends the eight hours of sleep she used to get because she was told to humping her hand, the pillow, whatever's stiff enough like a starving weasel until the shower is as much about standing the tile pink as cleaning herself. Sometime in the middle, usually, is when her skin lights up and the strange comes out to play. Sometime before dawn is when the creepy red glow fades and the room's actually dark.

She's going to drive up there, knock on the door, hug Ruby and throw herself at Kara. Easy as pie.

Until the wildfire alert is pushed to her phone by the State of California. Hundred miles north of San Franciso and over sixty miles east, against the prevailing winds. It's supposed to be the big one. The fire equivalent of the earthquake that sooner or later will ruin Los Angeles. Even the temples of the Google Plex and Apple's Spaceship campus are in the firing line. Frisco proper is hiding behind the great bowl of bedrock that formed it around the natural harbor, bolstered federal firefighters lined up like soldiers in a World War One trench. The suburbs might burn but while they hold their ground, the fire moves this far, no farther. 

The historic core of the city will endure.

Just like last year, when they came up with this insane plan for this insane mess and everyone in New York watched it like climate change was a Michael Bay movie.

Kara's place is a three-hour drive east of the Golden Gate in traffic and four hours from LAX but the traffic now is that of fleeing rats. One way. The winds are, for now, a forgiving 20 miles per hour west-northwest. Unless the winds reverse and double in speed, odd are in Sam's favor.

Surely Kara owns a car they can flee in? Play the license plate game? Take Ruby to stupid roadside attractions and eat diner food and kiss and fuck past checkout time and pay for an extra day in a dozen Motel 6s on the way back east?

Her bad idea of a guilty pleasure long weekend is now is a suicidal two-week vacation.

LAX is going to be closed for a week because of the smoke but some mad, probably student-loan-paying fool will take a $600 fare on Uber, straight through on the _empty_ side of a highway towards a goddamned wildfire line like it's traffic.

His name is Seth. She felt she should learn it since in fact, this might get them both killed.

He can provide a service and be paid far more than typical for the same hour of labor. He did the risk-reward in his head and made a choice. He has that killer instinct of a good trader but also asks if she's okay, if her eyes hurt if she wants a fresh wet cloth. He's human. 

More than likely, Seth is just ambitious and not full-on sociopathic which is the problem with half of her best salesmen. 

Sam worries whenever a client asks for something that will cost thousands of jobs. It hurts. It's also what paid for her mother's cancer treatment and now, a two-million-dollar bill after her death. The cost of a woman who kicked her out when she was eighteen because her obligation was done but Sam was too much of a sap to return the favor and stop caring.

Sam runs a company that destroys and absorbs smaller ones on behalf of huge ones because she knows it, she's good at it and it pays the bills.

Her human resources person is a sweetheart named Clarissa. Good Christian girl fully lost in New York but significantly more gay than she could be in bugfuck Arkansas. 

When Sam was looking to expand, she pranced in like the cat that caught all the canaries ever and put a book on Sam's desk.

 _Lessons from Criminal Psychology._ Third edition. Which now, God help us all, has a section with a sixty-point Antisocial Personality Disorder self-report diagnostic and on the other laminated side, questions about corporate culture, work ethic and more made to stealthily provoke the same key details. 

The bottom line was bad. Larger restructuring firms could just muscle around and didn't need to be quick or smart or any of the things that made Reign Financial and it's screaming-skull logo so fearsome and often-recommended.

Time to hire some people who thought stock trading was just easier on the fingertips than sewing human skin coats. It worked. That terrifies her. She did hire a PI to check for bodies under floorboards. Especially Felix's. Three thousand locations closed after that buyout and he put a green thumbs-up on his commission on the whiteboard. Sam went home, drank, threw up said drink and donated to the food bank smashed off her ass at 2 AM.

Seth seems nice. He peppers her with questions and his insights are good.

So if he survives and finishes that business degree, Sam's poaching him.

\-----

"That's a far as we should go. National Guard are turning people away up ahead," Seth warns her.

He pulls the Prius over under an orange-black sky between hills still blackened from last year's apocalypse.

"How far?"

"Thirteen miles."

Sam exhales. Track in high school. She can do this.

"You said you had a girlfriend, right?"

"Yeah. Simone."

"Great. What are her measurements?"

"What?"

"Just tell me."

He does, Sam thinks about it for a minute.

"Close your eyes loverboy."

"Your dime, your rules," he mutters.

He's been saying that a lot.

Ten awkward, ankle-smacking minutes later, she tells him to open. Her suit and slacks and _everything_ are zipped up in the garment bag. Her laptop, tablet, camera, two changes of actual clothes, a toothbrush and more changes of underwear than she will admit to with a gun to her head are in the hulking, flame-retardant backpack now.

"Tell her she's amazing and give her some interview clothes."

"How did you...that backseat is...and you are _not_ short and... Oh, come on. That is some ninja bullshit. Seriously though, Simone loves that look. Thanks!"

She slaps a cash tip in his hand along with her room card.

"Marriott by LAX. Room 203. Deny any knowledge of how the bedsheets got that way and have them FedEx the luggage to this address. Simone can have whatever's in the unlocked suitcase. Didn't fit. FedEx Ground's fine. Right. Going to go pull some romantic comedy level stupid, Seth. Wish me luck. Don't die!"

"You're crazy!" he jokes back, just before she slams the door behind her, zips up her windbreaker and hoists the backpack.

She gives him five stars. For putting up with Sam, there really should be an option for ten. One driver in New York actually said as much to her face.

So here she is in her yoga pants, compression shirt, windbreaker and her entirely unnecessary, no-coverage, probably is going to get smoke poisoning of the vagina type lingerie.

Maybe Kara will like them.

Sam takes in her surroundings. It's like the Book of Revelations throat-fucked the surface of the moon and this is the puke.

Easier to get around the soldiers on the _other_ side of this burned-out treeline...

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sam is thirsty!
> 
> Wall Street firms do, in fact, use these tests -- originally designed for pitiless killers -- as part of hiring.


	7. Backdraft - Oxygen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Kara finishes some DIY before the fire and Lena is starting to crack under the sheer thirst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Fire Tetrahedron is a model for understanding fires and how they start:
> 
> Heat.  
> Oxygen.  
> Fuel.  
> Chain Reaction.

**Lena Luthor, aged 37  
  
  
** Lena is drunk. She accepts this. She is also horny. She accepts that as well. She is bored. That _is_ worrisome. Because sometime in the next one to three days, this house will burn down. **  
**

All around her, talent is packing into cars, stuffing themselves, the personal effects they bring to the sets, their children -- most who have children have older ones and Third Sex has a schoolteacher on staff -- into a conga line of sports cars, minivans and classic Jeeps with painted bandanas in the old cruising signals from gay clubs meant to signal sexual preferences. Her found family is running, a convoy guiding each other down the road southward.

Leslie was not happy that Lena wasn't just coming with -- she even offered to share a fuckbuddy when they found a not-on-fire singles bar -- but Lena deferred.

Green-eyed bitches be crazy, as Leslie always says.

Her responsibility. Her family. She is last out.

The house is insured. What she didn't tell them is that it is a family property. It's in Lillian's name but she can fix that. She needs to watch it go up in flames. Needs to turn architecture into cash payout and then into donations to GLAAD and sex worker advocacy groups.

She only brought he production here so Leslie could drain her costars' last drop of fluids in a three-hour trainwreck of a shot that will _never_ wash out of Lillian's Egyptian cotton. Leslie and Gayle, scary and sweet. Perfect scene partners. She likes to toss in Imra Ardeen and her strange, dark eyes, that aloof old-world air of Cleopatra and Deliah.

They'll lose a third to payment processors and she'll give the stars and the staff eighty percent of what's left. Those three in a half-choreographed, half-natural free for all? Three metahuman lunatics, who know each other's every nerve ending, kink, limit, how far to push the limit? Who can warp minds and move things with a glance and throw lightning? 

The gross on paid downloads would buy this house.

She's not overly worried about the fire. Deepfakes aren't the only thing she's done with AI. She put in her flash drive with the 'Flamebird' modeling software she wrote last night. 

The conditions aren't right. Patterns reported in real-time by a hundred different garage-roof windvanes are fed into this website, volumetric models of fire under various wind conditions, probably of wind changes based on past years, estimated volatility of the tinder. Modeled and remodeled and remodeled. World War II was fought with paper files comprising a tiny fraction of the information pouring in and out of that black case in the basement every second.

When the chance of fiery death in the next three hours crosses 50/50, the red light on the kitchen counter will flash, she'll go downstairs to the panic room. Wait. Emerge like a phoenix. 

Until then, she won't leave one drop more scotch up here than she has to.

It makes Lena feel in control.

She's also getting the first remotely stimulating show that _doesn't involve_ an off-limits employee.

So what if she has to replace this $15,000 still camera after out of her own pocket? It's got the right zoom level.

She pulled the memory cards. She's not here to perv and take pictures just...enjoy. Slightly less pervy, Lena supposes. So she cranked it up and watched.

Up the hill, tucked cleverly under the ridge and just low enough that the flames crossing it wouldn't lick the roof, is a small metal hut. On the flat roof, a woman like Vargas pinup is wielding an acetylene torch to finish off some frame that must go to a not-yet added floor. Flame-retardant foam is in a hand-pumped sprayer behind her. A teenage-ish girl went inside half an hour ago after looking up at what must be her mother, blowing her a kiss and then calling a fast-moving cottonball or possibly a dog back inside. Then the shutters closed.

They're crazy to be hunkering down but the house _is_ all-metal construction and the chimney seems to have not just a filter but a _shutter_ and maybe, just maybe, if they had an oxygen supply, maybe in a deep enough basement, they could make hot cocoa and tell ghost stories and wait it out. The woman's calmness suggests that she can.

Concern for another day. The woman lifts her welders mask, wipes her sweaty face on her arm. Lena cranks the zoom far as it will go. Her eyes are bluer, darker and more intense than the flame was. She primes the pump for the protective foam and with each plunge, her sweaty biceps shake off a few drops. Lena's cunt answers with a fresh trickle of its own, each time.

Lena lifts the scotch.

It's empty.

The back gate _is_ open.

These _are_ comfy shoes.

Lena _is_ horny.

Women better than her _have_ died for stupider reasons.

That's when the stupid take-cover light flashes. 

Her eye candy lifts her head, _fucking sniffs_ and makes the same conclusion that Lena did with a hundred thousand dollars of in-house, purpose-built supercomputer. With all the confidence of tiger, an apex predator too mighty and powerful and too keenly aware of its surroundings to ever move hastily or jerkily, she drops the pump and torch off the roof into the grass and just _jumps_. Fifteen feet, easy. Just drops off the god-fucking-damn roof and lands in an easy crouch that shows a tensing column of raw sinew under her cut-off shorts. Lena _needs_ to be the gazelle. She craves it.

She is the unholy chimera of Marilyn Monroe's flesh, Arnold Schwarznegger's skeleton, and...no. No. Lena's brain cannot allow herself to think _that_ is real.

The shirt is _sweaty now_ and those are Farrah Fawcett grade nipples. This wild goddess just hoists her tools and goes inside and locks the door. 

Lena is destined to die unfucked, clearly.

She pockets the warning light and grabs a fresh 16-pack of AAA batteries before kicking the case of bottled water down the stairs.

It's going to be a long and lonely apocalypse.


	8. Backdraft - Fuel (1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where the finish line is a double entendre for Sam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point the 'aged X' are being dropped. We got our girls bearing down on each other, we don't need to annotate where they are in their life journeys.

**Lena**

Lena doesn't live in her car but she _could._ She has three looks: investor meeting, industry event and literally anything else. Anything else is a convergence of gray knit sweaters, formless gray cotton for when she stops caring, gag shirts about not trusting atoms, hip-hugger jeans and a few _meticulously_ selected 'fuck me' painted on tops. With the exception of the gala stuff, she can fit six months in three big duffle bags her trunk needing no more than trips to the farmer's market and a laundromat to rotate.

Stay nimble, stay flighty, agree to the parties, have a cute top for a friend, borrowed lipstick is perfect, you're a doll, thanks, sexy is in the body, in the moving, in the speaking. Never in the price tag of the dress. 

Old habits of a half-starving Boston hooker who moonlighted as a nomadic party floozy and virtue-ruiner for the daughters of Boston Brahmans. Thinking back, there's probably been more than one antique bed in a robber baron mansion where a Rockefeller's or a Kennedy's new bride had no maidenhood to lose because Lena had her first, in some chic squatter's den in the hallway speared to the knuckle, wide-eyed and gasping, Lena laughing into her mouth. 

_'See? It didn't hurt. So tight. So wet. All for me.'_

All the delectable, never-shall-we-meet evil that takes place in a party a good girl paid someone not to tell daddy she was at and Lena slid into uninvited and without a cover charge with a smile and a cleave-baring dip to straighten her heel.

Memories. Memories and the habits they create.

Semi-nomadic, duffel-bag living helps, with her work. Like most studios, she shoots in borrowed houses, plus a few family ones -- to the last survivor go the spoils -- or outdoors, shielded by parade permits with 'no police escort needed' in the checkbox. So it helps that Lena can settle anywhere she nests her little birds while they pluck each other's feathers.

She remains a creature of both that shabby Jamaica Plain flat of so many straying professors and open marriages and the wired-up, unprotected-circuit-board, sleep-and-hygiene optional and here-there-be-nerds lunacy that so encapsulates her time at MIT and brings her back every year. She never misses it even she sometimes only blearily remembers the red-eye flight. Instinctively, she finds that MTA station. Like a sea turtle returning to some secret untouched beach. She is no doubt their _least conventional_ but remains a well-received alumna speaker. 

Her higher calling is sexual, her hobbies and life is digital. 

If it's a power move, a posturing gaudy mess, it's for her gaming guilds and her voracious consumption of Third Sex features. She never lets herself edit them anymore. What Leslie looks like ripping a groan from Irma's throat is always something she wants to be surprised by, three glasses of red and two batteries in. The ominous, pillar-of-glass Mirage supercomputers. Expensive phone. Expensive gaming laptop. Expensive tablet. 

If it's luxurious, dainty, mistakable for art? It goes in her cunt, to her own needs. To a middle finger raised to the religious, to purity parties, to abstinence-only sex ed, to bridal veils, to centuries of "modern medicine" when the female orgasm was a myth. It is part of how she rages against all the slurs she hears the moment she steps outside her bubble of her work family and her home. She has more fun than her critics and she makes sure to know that however she can. Sleek. Glass. Stainless steel. Purring, humming, crackling faintly with electromassage. 

It also means that the bag she tossed down here could get her through the fire and into the winter. 

Lena takes in the panic room. Before she only kicked on the generator, turned on the exhaust hood and plugged in the Mirage. 

The last storm raged five days and the ground wasn't cool for two more. Say a week if active burning lingers in the area. 

Food. Food might be an issue. 

The panic rooms typically are also fallout shelters. It's a curious insight into mother dearest's lizard brain. What's down here is what Lillian feared to live without and it's the same property to property. Prim, gray or green clothes, warm. Almost like a soft, tailored prison jumpsuit. Handguns, a long hunting rifle and combat-centric shotguns, typically two or three land mines. Because what is suffering without adding more? Years and years worth of soap, shampoo. Water tracking charts for daily bathing. A well heeled woman would rather die than look unkempt, after all.

She would have died if she ever needed one of these for more than a hurricane.

Lillian was a nibbler and didn't starve mostly because access to staff meant she could have another bird-sized meal. Didn't seem to think that same daintiness shouldn't extend to her panic rooms. Her panic rooms with no staff, no way to resupply and with fucking Ronald Reagan posters and tips on how to spot a communist infiltration. The first time she found them, Lena used them for toilet paper but she has enough fun with that orifice that she really doesn't wan't his picture near it. 

Now, they're placemats. 

Each Lillian planned shelter has ninety half-serving sized canned peaches for the duration of the nuclear war. Lillian no doubt thought one per meal, plus these upscale saltines long since bad and the peanut butter that hasn't gone bad but rather _never was good_ and the Perrier meant thirty days. 

The Gipper would personally ride to the rescue long before. God knows she donated enough for his campaign to get that white-glove treatment.

They predate calorie labels but probably two hundred calories each. Tops. Two slices of peach. Four per meal to keep maintenance of 2,000 calories. Not thirty days. Seven.

It's not Lena's first time. This is a weird hobby of hers. Almost every time she finds some other way that Lillian would have starved, died, suffocated, whatever because she wasn't as smart as she thought. Her trial mix will help and she would never trust any water filter Lillian trusted. She set the battery-powered pump to work when she flicked on the lights. 

A sniff-check shows the peaches are fresh and a slurp shows they are slick and delicious.

The house sits on a ten-gigabit fiber line some spoiled Apple exec laid in. Lena paid the Google-affiliated team ten grand to tap into it, straight down, so that it could operate in the panic room. She'll get a ping when the new Leslie/Irma/Gayle video is up. Until then, she has some rage to vent.

She puts the fiber connector into the laptop directly -- always a vicious, wasteful thrill, that -- and waits for protocols meant for mainframes to align with programs meant for shitty cell phone reception like Fortnite, Call of Duty, and World of Warcraft. She's a goddamned Irish woman, if she wants a twenty-pound custom order laptop with steel shell and gothic wrought iron trim, she'll shrug off the salesman's gawping stare and get out her Amex. Careful use of her backpack straps keeps this bad habit unknown to her doctors and when she goes to game in the park, it turns daily walks from mild to murderous cardio.

She's actually not a great player. Decent. Ranked in her favorites. Silver, tops. Gold only in her true addiction: an unending, never-will-be-finished sci-fi open world called Shine Forever. She does have other hobbies. Mostly involving trying to get something _warm_ and alive and _willing_ between her thighs for a nice change of fucking pace.

While she waits for the Steam server, she cracks Lex's crazy old book. She never really _stopped_ trying to decode it. Her interested kicked up when a carcass that fell to the sands in Arizona was a dead ringer for an alien whose inner anatomy is listed here. The power that wrote this book was _ahead_ of its peers. Ahead of humans or aliens or time itself, she's not sure.

Today, it's all squiggles. So she flips out her notepad and writes down her to-dos.

> **Tell Leslie I'm not dead**
> 
> **Ask police to confiscate guns.**
> 
> **Buy actual goddamned food.**
> 
> **Pay someone to stock these places.**
> 
> **Mail nudes to List 2C of GOP congressmen.**

Lena taps the pencil on her tongue for a minute.

> **Meet woman of my dreams.**

The last line had to go on the last page. She didn't have space to write 'buy another notebook, alleged genius' so she has to tap that into her phone. 

Lesbian space pirates in an M-Rated game that doesn't fade to black. Always a safe bet.

She taps the quick launch for _Shine Forever_ and taps in her password. Going to lose the book, she sees the last, bare page of her notepad sinking into the still-unknown thing it's written on. Feels like paper. Doesn't cut with a chainsaw. The words fade and 'woman of my dreams' is replaced with a single, throbbing crimson glyph. Angular and five-sided and shifting moment to moment fore it to dims and leaves only a black smudge.

"Clearly," she scoffs. "Lillian's whiskey has also gone bad."

Lena cinches the gloves, drops the VR headset down and sets her phone to ping in if anything unsafe happens with the CO2 or temp.

She is now 'Scarface Jack' and last she heard, there was a _terrible infestation_ of rude, squeaky-voiced "oh yeah, well I fucked your mom!" teenagers on one of the outer rim planets. 

Scarface loaded up her ship and her personal ammo three stations ago and the feds have been missing her jump after jump. Time for those boys to learn who actually has a shot at their moms...

* * *

**Ruby and Talia**

"So."

Talia smiles.

"So."

"Rao, Tal, we are stuck in my crazy mechanic mom's _bunker version of the Burrow from Harry Potter_ in a firestorm. Let's be less weird to each other, OK?"

Talia shrugs.

"Whatever pretty girl says," she trills, big and toothy and lazing back in the beanbag. She's much taller than one mom and nearly as tall as the other and that's saying a lot with Ava in the mix but it also means no one ever really asked who carried her. That's not a Sara Lance sized person.

Talia learned to flirt from Sara, that's what Ruby finally figured out. She doesn't even mean to put 'pretty' and 'beautiful' in sentences like breadcrumbs and she actually once spit out word for word one of her mom's lines which she used on Alex. Accidentally. Great minds. _Probably_.

Earlier today, actually they were in the park. Ruby had had to chase Krypto and they fell in the pond together. Talia came up like a dolphin with a hair flip and everything and Ruby surfaced like someone that forgot momentarily that gravity was a thing. Which, in her panic to not let Talia get hurt or show her powers, she had.

_'I look like a mess, I know, Tal.'_

_'Actually, I was going to say beautiful.'_

Alex had told Kara about that one-nighter in general, Ruby-is-in-the-room terms and somehow Ruby remembers it at just the right time. When she was called on it Talia tackled Ruby-like someone who had been trained to fight by well, Sara Lance, and they kissed for five minutes until Ruby was done pouting. Then ruby made Talia pick the icky pond stuff out of her hair.

Which is how they are now stuck here with slightly smelly clothes in the hamper, nothing clean but pajamas and a fresh-scrubbed Krypto -- cuts his size in half -- sleeping on a pile of towels.

"Movie?" Talia asks.

"Nah."

"Video game?"

"Hells yeah!"

Ruby hops up. 

"What's good? I have...Fornite, natch but I think the neighborhood kids are mostly off. CoD is kinda dead unless the level has literal dicks."

"Literal dicks," Talia agrees. "They should not have allowed user-made maps."

Talia's blue eyes sparkle. That's the daughter of someone who used to kill people for money with her ninja girlfriend. The twinkle just _screams it._

"Ruby Isahkh Danvers! Is that a _Shine Forever_ founders edition in your closet? Are you eighteen, sweet little girl?"

Ruby blushes.

"My mom lets me."

"I'm sure she does," Talia smirks back. "Because your mom is bonkers. Acts like she forgot that sex is weird for people. Or never knew it. Any uses weird words like Rao. Anyhow."

"Got a second headset. Just the one pair of gloves though. Usually me and mom on the player-versus-environment servers."

"Great. You fly, I shoot."

Ruby snorts.

"No, I fly, you shoot because if you're wearing those gloves when we go dirtside you're going to be like a Vhoc-fucking Sith Lord."

"It has swords?"

"It has _laser_ swords, Tal."

Ruby clicks the headset on Talia's face. She sits opposite on the bed, back to back and gets ready to lower her own.

"Comfy?"

"Very. So I just...whoa...with my hands. Right. Can I _marry_ a video game?"

When her headset lights up, Talia's not-yet-named character with the default appearance is practicing Japanese katana forms with a hissing plasma cutter.

They're stuffed with sugar, Krypto is snoring. Talia's having fun. As stranded underground goes, this is fun.

* * *

**Kara**

This really shouldn't be that bad. Kara stocked up. She basically drained the internet of movies and TV. A coulan-design data storage device behind her hums and throbs. Buying where she could afford or cared, ripping where she couldn't. Fuck capitalism. She only knows one capitalist and given Sam what like naked...fuck capitalism...until she can't walk. 

She's currently cramming a '100 Worst Lesbian Movies' playlist into her brain at 8x playback speed because it's not like she'd rather be catching bullets or even being away from her kid. Talia is making huffing sounds and Ruby is walking her through some deep breathing. They must have emerged from Ruby's bedroom because they're in an unshielded room. Sounds like it was too long in VR for the human mind. 

_'Dramamine. Toothbrush. Mint.'_

_'I liked sitting there though, back to back.'_

_'So we can read a book, doofus.'_

It's cute.

_'Ah, crap. There's some in your hair.'_

A giggle and the gentle smack of skin on tile.

_'Better wash it. Just wing your clothes wherever. I'll go make a snack.'_

Ruby must have shoved Talia into the shower and closed the door, locking her in the dead-zone of the bathroom. Always feed the date, Ruby. Always. Her mom and her aunt and even Kelly are in lockstep on that.

After a while she hears a doorknob, running water, stuttering breath and the word 'Ruby' over and over, higher and higher and with less breath. If Talia behaves herself with Ruby, she won't tell Ava they shared a room. She plans to check the sleeping bags for use anyway. Implying it to Sara would just end up with Talia having a Costco-sized box of dental dams stuffed in her backpack.

\-----

She's midway through some ghastly, coded, why-did-they-even-bother thing from the early 1980s when the TV blanks out with a perimeter alert showing someone has passed the outer barrier -- in other words, not high energy, high heat or highly kinetic threat -- and is at the inner barrier ten feet from the house. Right in front of her front door and a hundred fifty feet from the fireline that will be over the hill in ten minutes.

The house is supersense proof and she can no more X-ray vision _out_ than someone could X-ray vision or anything else really looking _in._

So she set up some cameras. Two of them are cheap throwaway webcams that weren't meant to be used for more than one fire. One's already half cooked, on the danger side. The lens casing plastic melted and is oozing across the staticky, failing feed. The other one is fine. The other one shows a lean, tall woman in yoga pants and a backpack, outlined with whirls of tarry black smoke. she keeps tapping the bubble shield with her finger, like she could figure it out if she poked it. Or like she finds it funny.

_Why in the world would someone..._

Kara shrugs. Nothing to do but help her.

She starts the faucet in the kitchen on full blast with cold water and crams bath towels into it. Krypto seems to have let himself out of the girl's bedroom and taken up residence in the prep-counter cupboards.

"JUst because you found food in there once doesn't mean there ever will be again. I'm smarter than you."

He gives her the most polar hound head tilt ever as if to say 'you sure?' and given that he's far smarter than an Earth dog, he will probably get her again. At some point.

Kara takes a towel, holds it over her head and opens the door.

"What? Sam?"

She rushes over and gathers a woozy, grimy, somehow _weakened_ Sam Arias into her arms. It's like her powers aren't active or her body doesn't know she has them. If Kara had left any weight in the possibility she was a Daxamite, Braalian or Teronian, Sam's opaque skin disproves them. She could _see_ into those bodies. This is a peer. This is a fellow survivor. This is, maybe, please Rao, a lost princess like her.

Sam's also heavy but that makes sense if she's so out of her own mind that she can't access her body.

They make it inside.

"Something bad happen?" Kara asks, taking one of the smaller towels and wiping Sam's face. "Is someone after you? Here. Water."

Sam gulps it down and Kara is not going to be able to keep hands to herself, not after she's seen ice water slice a trail of clean perfection through the ash on Sam's long, bobbing neck.

"Had to fly to LAX. Wanted to stop by. Had to sort of uh, hurry."

"I did text you my address," Kara reminds herself. "And I had sort of meant to invite you."

"M'smart like that," Sam insists. "Multitask."

"Someone just walked through fire in..."

Kara cheats. It's Sam. She'll forgive her.

"Crotchless panties from Fredrick's of Hollywood. Someone isn't smart. Someone is _horny."_

"Yeah. Are you mad?"

Kara hops up from where she'd been wiping hand clean to kiss Sam.

"Mmm. Little bit. Up on the counter."

When Sam acts confused Kara curls her hands around Sam's hips and just moves her there."

"It's where snacks go."

Kara lets her hands fall on shaking, Lycra-clad knees. Kara doesn't push. Just waits. If it drags on, she'll ask.

Sam's head falls back so fast she clips a cabinet. 

"Ow. Hurt."

"Sorry. Probably should take you somewhe-"

Sam's hand slashes through the air, maybe her first-ever use of superspeed and grips Kara's head tight. The short haircut gives her no purchase but she doesn't need it. 

"Use your words. Consent."

Brown eyes stare down at Kara, long since faded-to-black by Sam's arousal.

"I consent for you to rip those open, get your tongue in there and make me forget I could've died."

Sam does, however, seem to be ahead of her body. Her nipples look achingly stiff and her breathing is scattered, patchy, quick but she can't seem to figure out her lower half. 

So Kara lands a sharp slap on the inside of each calf.

"Legs spread. Now."

"Trying," Sam whines.

Kara has had enough herself. She forces Sam's legs apart and is rewarded with a huffed out 'fuck' and a whole body shudder. When they swap kinks, that's going to need a follow-up.

Sam's ash-stained yoga pants are darkish pink except _there_ where they're rose red and clinging with slick. The problem is the _seam_ is right there and Kara is terribly jealous of a little coil of fabric. She glides up enough to get a bunch in between her incisors. On the way she learns that Sam oils, probably brushes, but does not shave and it's a glorious, tickling _perfumed mess_. She pins the fabric with her thumbs and pulls on the bitten-down tuft she has. 

Every little _rrrp!_ sound makes Sam shake. 

"Fuck! Is that enough?"

"Mmm-mmm."

"Fucking hell, Kara! Can you get at my clit or not?"

"Yes," Kara growls into the fabric.

"Then don't make me wait."

Having to find Sam's clit would be a fun game but Sam's clit disagrees. It stands out from under its dark hood, pink and quivering and announcing Sam's pulse like a drum solo.

"How do you like it?"

"Sam?"

Sam gulps.

"I...I...this is really happening?"

"Yes," Kara promises. "If you can tell me how you like it."

"Slow licks. Don't flick. Suck more as I get close. Then _only_ suck and after I've come once, nibbling is an option."

Well, now Kara has her whole goddamned afternoon planned out.


End file.
